The rising cost of living and an abnormal hike in commodity prices takes away a major portion of the increased income of the garment workers in the post-Covid-19 period, according to a survey.
The survey also said that the income of the garment workers during the first three months of 2022 (January-March) increased mainly due to increased workloads and overtime in order to meet the production of increased purchase orders.
However, the additional income failed to help them go back to the pre-pandemic situation as the cost of living has increased manifold, the survey found.
The findings were found in a survey titled “The Lives of Garment Workers during Covid-19”, carried out jointly by the South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM) and Microfinance Opportunities (MFO), which were presented at a virtual event on Thursday, May 19.
SANEM and MFO have been jointly conducting a series of surveys since March 2020 to better understand how the lives of the garment workers in Bangladesh have evolved during the Covid-19 crisis.
These surveys are being conducted under the project titled “Garment Worker Diaries (GWD)”.
For the survey, every week, they selected a pool of 1,300 garment workers from the country’s major garment industrial hubs like Dhaka, Savar, Gazipur, Narayanganj and Chittagong.
On average, the garment workers' cost of living or house rent went up by 17% or more over a period of two years from the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020.
Moreover, their expenditure on food, especially staples (rice, wheat etc) increased by 12%.
According to the law, a worker's regular working time is eight hours and he/she can do additional two hours as overtime.
“But they were not engaged in working more hours because they enjoyed it. They worked more over time as they could earn more by doing so,” said Farah Marzan, project field manager of GWD, in her presentation.
She also said that an operator of a factory was assisted by three helpers before the pandemic but at present, they don't get such support thus increasing their workloads.
In his presentation, Dr Bazlul Haque Khondker, chairman of SANEM explained that a worker had to work more than 10 hours a day which resulted in an increase in income.
Despite the increase in income, the workers could not go back to their pre-Covid situation as their house rent now reached Tk3,500 from Tk3,000, he said.
Moreover, he also mentioned that the price of rice has also increased from Tk40 per kg to Tk54 from January 2017 to January 2022.
He suggested keeping the workloads at a tolerable level for sustainability.