ILO and UN Women have taken a joint move to find out the current composition of workforce by gender and age in the country’s readymade garment (RMG) sector, sources said.The joint venture also seeks to explore the factors that guide recruitment of women workers and how long they continue to work. This is aimed at undertaking necessary steps including strengthening of policy and legislative interventions, they added.International Labour Organisation (ILO) and UN Women have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to conduct a study in this regard, they said.According to industry insiders, some four million workers are employed in the country’s $28 billion RMG industry where 80 per cent of them are women.”The main objective of the study is to identify and analyse the key factors and causes of why female workers leave the RMG sector after some years of their services and where they are going after they leave their jobs,” Srinivas B Reddy, ILO Bangladesh Country Director, told the FE. Citing ‘Better Work’ statistics showing around 60 per cent of the existing garment workforce being women, he said the study would also look into their proportion in the workforce and its declining trend.It would also explore whether there is any health and occupational issues responsible for women leaving jobs as female workers join garment factories as young adults and leave at their mid-career, he explained.The country’s knitwear sector is growing day by day and it is dominated by male workers, he said adding the study will also look into whether the growing knitwear sector is affecting the overall proportion.Moreover, it is observed that increased wages have also encouraged male workers to join the garment industry, Mr Reddy noted.”The whole idea is continue to promote opportunities for women and promote growing opportunities for them in higher-level jobs like technicians, supervisors and managers and to see how women could be encouraged to take higher responsibility in the garment industry,” he said.The move was led by some observations and beliefs of the industry insiders that female garment workers enter their jobs as young adults and leave their jobs at what would often be considered their mid-career, sources said.Though jobs at garment factories offer low wages, these help women garment workers to support their families in their villages, they added.”This occupation of women in the RMG sector has been instrumental in their economic empowerment and in improving their social – economic status,” said Shammin Sultana, Programme Officer, Gender Mainstreaming at Improving Working Conditions in the Readymade Garment Sector Programme of ILOIt is quite perplexing to see why they leave their jobs and revert through their own choice to a possible unemployment situation and risk of poverty, especially in cases where they may turn out to be the main wage earners in their families, she added.About 80 per cent of the garment workers in the country are women, she said adding in recent years, the share of women workers in the garment sector is going down.A 2015 survey by Asian Centre for Development reported that 65 per cent of workers in the RMG sector were women.All these data including those of ILO’s Better Work indicated that the number of female workers has been reduced in the sector. “We hope that the findings will be available in late 2018 and these will determine what types of measures/plans we should take to face the identified challenges,” Ms Sultana added.
