In Bangladesh's garment trade, empowerment comes at $20 a week
The growing power of Bangladesh's female garment workers

The slum-dwellers of Dhaka will often paint their babies' faces with heavy black crayon, exaggerating their eyes and eyebrows and colouring a large dot on their foreheads.

It gives these Bangladeshi infants a strange, unearthly look of wisdom and power beyond their years. The purpose, I was told, is to offer protection from bad spirits, from envy, from the hardships of life.

Growing up in the mud-filled misery of a Dhaka shantytown, many of these young people will need all the help they can get. Officially, some 43 per cent of Bangladeshis live below the poverty line and the country ranks 146 out of 186 on the UN's development index.

That's why the country's garment trade, despite all its endemic problems, is so important.

It may be a swamp of exploitation, but it is still one of the few routes up and off the lowest rung of poverty here. It's also played a hugely significant role in the empowerment of Bangladeshi women.

"You know when a girl came out of the village to join the garment industry there was a lot of human cry, there was a lot of noise and discouragement," says Shirin Sharmin Chowdhury, the first woman to be elected speaker of Bangladesh's Parliament.

"But you know when she went back with some income and she spent it on the family, she helped her poor parents or she helped her sister go to school, things changed."

Chowdhury is one of several high-profile women in Bangladeshi politics, a group that includes the country's prime minister and the leader of the opposition, and who were all born into more privileged lives than most women here.

She was also the one responsible for drafting the country's development program for women, which, among other things, calls for an allowance for lactating mothers working in the garment trade.

'We have rights'

Women now make up an estimated 80 per cent of Bangladesh's four million textile workers.

When they turn up for their work shifts at factories in Dhaka's northern industrial suburbs, it is like a sea of colour coursing through the busy streets, the individuality of their bright, traditional saris a far cry from the uniform jeans and T-shirts they make for the Gap or Joe Fresh.

It's an important group given that the industry itself is in turn responsible for about 80 per cent of the country's exports. In addition, many of these women are supporting extended families back home, and so they are starting to feel their strength.

One woman I met at a workers' rights headquarters in a shady Dhaka neighbourhood, had come there to ask advice. She said that she and other women were being bullied by their employer when they complained about working conditions.

"I'm not afraid of anything," she told me. "I came here to get my proper rights. I know I'm a good worker, I have confidence. That's why I came here. I want to do something for everyone and me, too."

This woman is 21 and has been working in the industry for only six months, earning a monthly wage, which includes overtime, of about $80. She sends most of it home to her family.

"I could get household work -as a cleaner-", she says. "But I get more money from garments. And in a household, if I break some plates the owner -can- beat me and anytime say 'get out of my house.'

"But in garments we have rights, we have power."

Micro-credit

One of the reasons working women may feel more empowered these days is because of their access to credit, or more specifically what's called micro-credit, which Bangladesh economist Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Prize for championing on behalf of those too poor to gain access to traditional credit institutions.

Shameron Abed runs the micro-financing department at BRAC (formerly Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), an international development agency based in Dhaka, and he credits micro-financing with helping Bangladeshi women get out the door in the first place.

"I would suggest that the fact that so many women in Bangladesh now come out of their homes and work in the ready-made garments industry is also partly because of the early work done through micro-finance, and other initiatives to get them …used to working whether in factories or farms and fields."

Ninety per cent of BRAC's loans go to women. "Women, I think, are more credit-worthy, more responsible, more disciplined," Abed says. When it comes to money, "they spend it better, manage it better and pay it back better."

Still, the life of the vast majority of these Bangladeshi women is no fairy tale, and Abed is quick to point out that domestic violence and rape are still big problems.

"Only recently have women been allowed to pass on citizenship to their children in this country, traditionally it was only men," he says. "Only in the past couple of years has the government increased maternity leave up to six months.

"So we're starting to catch up, but there are things that still need to be done. There's still a lot of difference in pay between men and women who do the same job."

Islamist pushback

Another, perhaps more worrying concern is the calls by hard-line Islamists, who are finding a louder voice in Bangladeshi society, to roll back some of these recent gains and, in particular, to scrap the women's development program fashioned by Chowdhury.

Bangladesh is almost 90 per cent Muslim, but human rights workers say the hardliners are taking advantage of tensions between the ruling and opposition parties to further their own agenda.

"The irony should not be lost on anyone that where a certain segment of militant Islamists talk about rolling back women's rights, you know, removing women from the public sphere etc., is devoid of a basic understanding of what runs the economy of the country," says Faustina Pereira, head of human rights and legal aid services at BRAC.

"What would have happened if women had not taken up professions that men are leaving, for example, like the agricultural sector?"

Chowdhury agrees that the role women are playing in society now is simply too important for them to be forced back into their homes now.

What's more, she says, Bangladeshi woman fought in the country's war of independence from Pakistan in 1971. "So it is very difficult to roll back the women development and the women empowerment, the way we stand today. It can only go forward and that is how I look at it."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/06/17/f-vp-evans-bangladesh-women.html

"In Bangladesh's garment trade, empowerment comes at $20 a week"
"In Bangladesh's garment trade, empowerment comes at $20 a week"
"In Bangladesh's garment trade, empowerment comes at $20 a week"

Also, happy first week of work discipline.

libelous_slander posted:

Rights are an ILLUSION michael

slumlord posted:

lol if you think women are empowered anywhere

yesterday a GOP congressman implied that 15 week old male fetuses can masturbate in the womb so we shouldn't be able to have abortions. so yeah

Superabound posted:

SariBari posted:

yesterday a GOP congressman implied that 15 week old male fetuses can masturbate in the womb so we shouldn't be able to have abortions

because the fetus will go straight to hell if you do?

no he actually said, if they can feel pleasure who's to say they can't feel pain?

getfiscal posted:

SariBari posted:

there really is no excuse for grown ass women with morals to be going into these stores anymore. also you can usually find it in thrift stores so why keep buying it from the mall?

maybe they want nice clothes macklemore. keep your morals off my hangers.

third wave

littlegreenpills posted:

i see. are online made to measure apparel retailers like eShakti equally problematic. i heard they pay their seamstresses more and keep overhead low by not having any physical infrastructure. still people in DHL transit centres in india have to handle that shit. what do you know in your brain

yeah, re:eshakti i have heard good things since it helps women with real sizing but then the delivery stuff comes up like you say. the delivery stuff really nags at me and keeps me in the Goodwill even if i can find a "good" retailer online. i got a new sewing machine and serger for my bday and am taking sewing lessons this summer. i would like to start teaching middle school/high school kids how to sew so they have an appreciation for labor and can wear clothes that actually fit them. also they will need these skills to steal EU jobs if anyone in europe accepts this shit trade deal we are offering up at g8

tpaine posted:

is that grown-ass women or grown ass-women

choose your own adventure

tpaine posted:

if i buy my boxer shorts at k-mart am i contributing to the misery of bangladeshi people

*turns tpaine around in the middle of the store like a mom to check his tag and measure jeans against his waistline*

SariBari posted:

no he actually said, if they can feel pleasure who's to say they can't feel pain?

hrm. i always thought official eXtian doctrine was that any non church-sanctioned sexual pleasure was grounds for immediate execution, but it seems there are exceptions. non-conscious babeis have it pretty sweet imho

Goethestein posted:

Nice to see all the so-called liberals opposed to women working

i'm opposed to anyone working except my parents

Red_Canadian posted:

It's kind of worrying that women were only really let in the the general, and not informal workplace, when all the men were off fighting wars. And what, when militancy amongst workforces was on the rise. A conspiracy theorist would imagine that both world wars were an attempt by industrialized countries to get rid of their militant-minded workers, and replace them with far less militant women, as well as destroying solidarity among workers.

it shocks me how astoundingly little the absolute female domination of the American steel and shipbuilding industries during the war resulted in changing longterm public perceptions of "mans work" vs. "womens work"

Superabound posted:

i think one of the main issues is that even today, even in the upper echelons of Wall St and high finance, all female labor is still seen as "temporary" and only "as needed". the whole maternity leave discussion i think is a good signifier of this

it's seen as quota satisfaction