What?

Over the past months, some of our readers and other interested stakeholders have asked for more detail about the geographic distribution of the workers participating in the Garment Worker Diaries (GWD) study in Bangladesh. As we have stated in all our blogs and other publications, the sample was selected from five areas where there is a concentration of RMG factories: Chattogram, Dhaka City, Gazipur, Narayanganj, and Savar. MFO chose these areas because this is where factories are concentrated, and at the time when we were building our sample we only had factory locations to guide us. 

In this week’s blog post we provide an update on our sample, including a comparison of the distribution of our sample in comparison to the distribution of garment workers identified in the 2017 Labour Force Survey (LFS)—a dataset that was not available to use when we started the GWD. As might be expected the LFS results show that workers are, indeed, concentrated in the areas we targeted and the distribution of workers across those areas is similar to the distribution of the GWD sample.

The blog also includes an updated, interactive map showing the distribution of the sample, overlaid with the locations of all the factories identified in the Open Apparel Registry and Mapped in Bangladesh.

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

The end of September 2021 marked one full year and a half of continuous data collection with garment workers in Bangladesh. Our blog for this week summarizes the most recently collected data through the end of September.

And in case you missed it, here is our most recent #OpenDiaries post in which we asked garment workers whether the COVID-19 pandemic has changed how they work and if so, how.

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

For this week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog we’re providing an overview of some new questions we’ll be adding to our surveys. The new questions cover the topics of savings, spending, workers’ support networks, and food security in more depth than we have been doing up until now. We’ll also be asking more questions that are concerned with control over finances and decision-making when it comes to spending money. We hope these new questions will offer even more insights into the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh, and in particular will add to our understanding of womens’ ability to control their own finances.

We look forward to sharing some of the results from these questions with you in just a few weeks.

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

Salary payments are the subject of this week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog. As we’ve discussed before, the share of garment workers in Bangladesh receiving digital salary payments increased dramatically in May 2020. But since summer that year, digital salary payments have tapered off and now the share of workers receiving either a cash or digital salary payment are much closer.

MFO, SANEM and our partner for this blog post, Mathematica, wanted to get a more detailed understanding of how salary payments are currently being handled. So we went straight to the source and asked garment workers how they’re being paid. We discuss the timing of salary digitization, subsequent developments since the rapid rise in digitization in the spring of 2020, non-salary payments, payment variation among workers within the same factory, and workers’ control over and knowledge of their digitized payments.

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