RMG sector under deadline pressure

A delegation of EU workers' federation and buyer groups meeting with Jute and Textile Minister Shajahan Siraj served a six-month notice on the garment manufacturers to ensure workers' safety, improve salary packages and upgrade working conditions or face shrinkage of export to Europe.

Since it is the government which has to secure compliance with the international labour and working safety standards from the garment sector, the ball is basically in the government's court.

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The retention of market in our single largest export destination, the EU, is made contingent upon meeting a number of conditions such as adoption of adequate safety measures in the garment units, bringing Spectrum sweater industry owners under full legal coverage, payment of full salary to survivors, adequate compensation to victims of the Savar factory collapse, suitable overtime allowance to women workers and granting them leave with full salary during pregnancy.

These demands have been made from time to time by various worker rights groups through the local media. And, every time that a fire incident took place in a garment factory killing and injuring workers, the civil society including the media urged the government and the RMG industry leaders to avert recurrence of such an accident by taking appropriate safety uplift measures. Now, the pressure has come from the outside world, much to our embarrassment. The stake is that unless we show definitive signs of setting things right within a reasonable time-frame in keeping with what other countries have done, it could be another crunch in the making apart from the crunch-time we are already having in terms of the post-MFA shocks in the free-trade regime.