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This week’s Garment Worker Diaries update brings the project up to date in Bangladesh through the end of March 2022. Among our usual monthly updates, we continue to monitor work hours within the context of total working days in a month in order to highlight the fact that many garment workers in Bangladesh end up working more hours than legally allowed. This is not their fault, however. Many of them are forced to work excess hours because this is the only way they can earn enough money to provide a decent life for themselves and their families. 

In the near future, we look forward to sharing a paper we’ve written detailing our living wage analysis for garment workers in Bangladesh. What that analysis will reveal is the unsurprising fact that garment workers earn nowhere near enough money to cover expenses that many people in developed countries would characterize as the bare minimum for a decent life.

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

This week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog covers a subject we have not yet touched upon: automation in the workplace. The questionnaire we posed to respondents just this past April 1st allowed workers to share with us their own feelings and attitudes towards automation in their factories. We think this survey is unique in both its interview subjects and its scope; that is to say, much that has been written on automation does not take into account actual workers’ experiences within factories, and instead focuses on larger economic issues. What do 1,300 Bangladeshi garment workers have to say? As always, we asked them.

We think the results of the survey are important, and point towards a potentially positive future, if workers’ abilities and expectations are taken into account in an ever more automated world.

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

In last week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog we looked at spending and decision-making habits to see what female garment workers are buying and whether they have control in deciding what to buy. We reported that for the most part, women report being able to make their own expenditure decisions.

This week, we keep the focus on gender, but we group respondents into behavioral segments based on their household roles to see if we can learn anything more about how spending decisions are made among garment workers in Bangladesh.

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

Gender, spending and decision-making are up for discussion in this week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog. In the first part of the blog, we focus on the most costly expenses garment workers incur from week to week. And in the second part of the blog, we discuss how garment workers decide to make those expenditures. Some interesting results arise when it comes to money transfers garment workers send to members of their households and to their networks outside the house.

We’ll also be sticking with this subject next week as we analyze worker spending decisions through the lens of a segmentation of women workers based on their role in their household.

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