The country’s female garment workers have a wage gap of around 51 per cent to 60 per cent depending on the area and living wage benchmark in five major industrial areas in Bangladesh, including Dhaka city, a survey finds.
However, the wage gap for male workers remains at 45 per cent to 54 per cent, according to the survey of the South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (Sanem).
The Sanem has been conducting the survey in collaboration with Microfinance Opportunities (MFO), a USA-based non-profit organisation, on 1,300 selected garment workers in Dhaka city, Chittagong, Gazipur, Narayanganj, and Savar every week since April 2020.
Three-quarters of the survey respondents are women, which roughly represents the composition of the labour force in the readymade garment (RMG) sector as a whole, it said.
According to the survey, the median earnings of a month reported by the workers, excluding the overtime, was Tk 9,984 — Tk 9,669 for women and Tk 10,928 for men — in the April-June period.
However, the countrywide current wage gap is from Tk 9,408 to Tk 15,616 per month for women and Tk 7,947 to Tk 14,400 for men.
“The remuneration received for a standard work week by a worker in a particular place sufficient to afford a decent standard of living for the worker and her or his family,” according to the definition of living wage by the Global Living Wage Coalition (GLWC).
“The elements of a decent standard of living include food, water, housing, education, healthcare, transportation, clothing, and other essential needs, including provision for unexpected events.”
The living wage range was estimated to be Tk 19,200 to Tk 22,900 for Dhaka, Tk 21,300 to Tk 26,000 for Chattogram and Tk 19,200 to Tk 22,900 for Gazipur, Narayanganj and Savar, Sanem said.
