What?

This week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog is our regular monthly update on what we are learning from garment workers in Bangladesh about their work, health, and financial situation. We are keeping a close eye on work hours after the government raised the legal limit on the number of hours worked to 12 hours per day (72 hours per week). Future blogs will be looking at whether 12 hours per day becomes the new normal—in June 14% of our sample worked hours in excess of that number.

As always, you can send any questions you have for MFO, SANEM, the workers or about the project to questions@workerdiaries.org.

In our two previous Garment Worker Diaries blog posts in this Excess Work Hours series we’ve discussed two key sets of data: 

• The Bangladeshi government just recently increased the legal limit on work hours per week for garment workers, coinciding with a rise in excessive work hours that have been getting reported to us as part of the Garment Worker Diaries study (part one).
• Many garment workers feel that they have no choice but to work overtime when it is requested of them, and a sizable share also think that if they refuse to work overtime, they risk being penalized by factory management (part two).

In this third part in the series, we start to analyze excess work hours by additional variables, including regions within Bangladesh and whether or not a garment factory’s name appears on certain publicly available supplier lists. As time goes on we hope to isolate additional variables to understand exactly who is working excess hours and where they are doing it.

As always, you can send any questions you have for MFO, SANEM, the workers or about the project to questions@workerdiaries.org.

Two months ago in early May, Eid al-Fitr was observed in Bangladesh, and many garment workers would have been granted leave from their factories to commemorate the holiday. While this meant many workers could spend more time with family and friends and pursuing personal leisure activities, they also would have had less money to spend, having already received advance salary payments in April ahead of the Eid holiday. Click through to our May 2022 update to see how workers fared that month, and how they managed their finances.

As always, you can send any questions you have for MFO, SANEM, the workers or about the project to questions@workerdiaries.org.

As the European Union continues its work to define, codify and enforce due diligence directives in international procurement, certain aspects of manufacturing suppliers’ business practices will likely start being scrutinized in novel ways. In this week’s blog we look at the issue of the relationship between excess work hours and forced labor, leveraging the strength of the Diaries methodology to ask workers questions that speak to the policy dialogue that is on-going in Europe and integrating their answers with the data we track weekly.

We find that most garment workers, already stretched thin working excess hours just to earn a decent living wage, couldn’t turn down the offer of overtime hours even if they wanted to. And we find that the less choice they say they have the more likely they are to have worked excess hours. These results are troubling, and we hope policy-makers and brands selling in Europe will take notice.

As always, you can send any questions you have for MFO, SANEM, the workers or about the project to questions@workerdiaries.org.