An official move to look into their rights and workplace safety issues raised by the garment workers through a hotline number has hardly made any visible outcomes in absence of timely responses from the authorities concerned, industry insiders said. Moreover, all the garment factories across the country have not yet come under the initiative even more than one year after its introduction in Ashulia-based garment factories as a pilot programme, they said. Non-cooperation from the factory managements and shortage of manpower and experience in handling such complaints are among the reasons behind the poor timely response, they added. Officials, however, attributed absence of adequate publicity and awareness programmes in popularising the move among the workers and making it effective for such slow progress. Labour leaders, on the other hand, expressed opinion that workers are not aware of the move due to lack of campaigns both from government side and different rights groups as government did not engage the latter in the process. The Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments (DIFE) in cooperation with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) launched a helpline initially targeting garment factory workers in March last year. Since the inauguration of the service to January 2016, a total of 815 complaints have been recorded of which 197 were irrelevant, according to the DIFE officials. A good number of calls were made just to know about the number while 383 complaints were lodged related to garment sector, they added. “Majority of the complaints were about wages, termination, general leave, maternity leave and benefit and misbehaviour by the mid-level management,” a DIFE official said. When asked, DIFE Inspector General Syed Ahmed admitted that they were not receiving desired number of calls or complaints as expected while the response in addressing the accusations is very poor. “We have shortage of manpower and expertise in addressing such concerns while at least five sittings are needed to resolve an issue,” he mentioned. Workers also either don’t know or know little about the hotline number due to inadequate publicity, he said adding DIFE is planning to take some promotional activities to create awareness among the workers and factory managements. A group of people said that rights groups don’t campaign in favour of hotline as they get ‘token money’ or ‘commission’ from the victim workers after solving their problems. Partially admitting the allegation, Sirajul Islam Rony, a labour leader, said government should involve the rights groups in the process for getting desired outcomes. “Workers come to the labour unions or federations as they (labour unions) resolve the workers’ concerns within the shortest possible time following discussion with the factory authorities,” he noted. The establishment of a hotline for the garment workers is one of the conditions for regaining the generilised system of preferences (GSP) from the US.
