Home
Back Issues
The Team
Contact us
 
Volume 3 Issue 9| October 2010

Inside

 

Original Forum Editorial

Unanswered Questions about the Garments Wage Issue
and Our Constitution

--Jyoti Rahman

The Road to Recovery
--Syed Ashfaqul Haque
Living Wage is Not Just Wages
--Mir Mahfuz ur Rahman
Made in Bangladesh: Our garments sold abroad
--Ziauddin Choudhury
Getting and Staying Active in Later Life--ASM Atiqur Rahman
Photo Feature: Climate Refugees of Bangladesh
--Monirul Alam
Have We Been Shaken Up Enough?
--Dr. A. S. M. Maksud Kamal
Including People with Disabilities in Development--Nancy Rollinson
Private University Act: Implementation is more challenging
--Abdul Mannan

Nationalism's Last Frontier
--Quazi Zulquarnain Islam

Forum Archives

 

Forum Home

 

Editor's Note

The month of fasting leading up to Eid-ul Fitr, a season routinely marked by garment workers raising demands for payment of arrear dues and the festival bonus passing off positively and peacefully, we are now confronted with the core issues affecting the garments sector.

In the relative lull, a phase of introspection has set in among the stakeholders to come to grips with problem areas impeding realisation of the garment sector's full potential. We crave for seeing the process come to fruition and thus wish to facilitate it with all the inputs we are able to put together in this issue courtesy a select band of contributors.

The sector is the largest foreign exchange earner and by far the biggest employer, particularly of women yielding considerable spin off dividends. It has remarkably succeeded in favourable international clime and survived through the bad patches in spite of inner contradictions and constraints to fetch sizable forex.

The hiatus between the government-fixed minimum wage of Tk 3,000 per month and that of Tk 5,000 being demanded by workers and largely supported by experts is disturbingly wide. It will take a lot of doing to bridge the gap. Tk 5,000 a month is a barely subsistence or living wage. Yet the garment manufacturers and exporters dish out all sorts of calculations to justify their spurning the suggestion. Through lack of well researched data and analysis their contention that they will lose out on competitiveness amidst lowering of prices if they were to allow higher wages remains to be addressed and assailed. So the cry for reliable database is eminently justified.

It will be a strategic move for banks to fund sick industries to resurrect because their workers tend to put a spanner on the works of the compliant and successful industries. Eventually, we may have to go for equity participation of the workers to give them a stake in the industries.

The interregnum between the September issue and the current one coincides with a series of other concerns such as well being of the ageing, earthquake preparedness status, physically and mentally challenged people, getting the most out of private universities and multicuturalism in football affecting nationalism which should provide good read

 

 



 

© thedailystar.net, 2010. All Rights Reserved