Bangladesh’s garment sector is being hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and the workers who stitch the world’s fast fashion are paying the steepest price.
The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, a group that speaks for factory owners, said this week that $2.81 billion in work orders across 1,025 plants had been scrapped. The country ships more clothing abroad than any nation except China.
A survey of plant owners conducted through Pennsylvania State University found the scrapped orders, which many Western buyers are declining to pay, left millions of laborers with no back pay or severance; a large share of them are women who came from villages. Nearly every Western purchaser declined to chip in for wages, the survey said.
“Our situation is apocalyptic,” Rubana Huq, the association’s president, told the New York Times.
Dana Thomas, whose book “Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes” traced the trade, said the nation leans too hard on one sector, with clothing making up eighty-four percent of its shipments abroad.
Thomas, who reported from Bangladesh, noted that a typical worker there brings home about $95 monthly, which is half of the $214 a month economists treat as a living wage.
When plants reopen, Thomas warned, wages are likely to sink further. She noted that workers “don’t have unemployment, and they don’t have health insurance, and they don’t have maternity leave, and they don’t have paid vacation.”
The downturn echoes the Rana Plaza factory collapse, in which 1,134 people died and more than 2,500 were hurt, a disaster Thomas wrote about in her book.
Sources
- “It’s Collapsing Violently”: Coronavirus Is Creating a Fast Fashion Nightmare | GQ
- In Pictures: The effects of coronavirus lockdown in Bangladesh | Coronavirus pandemic | Al Jazeera
