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Women’s Empowerment Revisited: from Individual to Collective Power Among the Export Sector Workers of Bangladesh

Naomi Hossain
Research Fellow
Participation, Power and Social Change Team, Institute of Development Studies

Abstract/ Executive Summary:

Bangladesh has become known as something of a success in advancing gender equality since the 1990s. There have been rapid gains in a number of social and economic domains, yet by most objective standards the current condition and status of women and girls within Bangladeshi society remain low. Rapid progress has come about under conditions of mass poverty and interlocking forms of social disadvantage, political instability and underdevelopment, overlain with persistent ‘classic’ forms of patriarchy. Mass employment of women and girls in the country’s flagship export sector – the readymade garments (RMG) sector – has been one of the more visible and prominent changes in women’s lives since its late 1970s’ introduction. Whether and the extent to which RMG or garments employment has changed the lives of women workers for the better has been the subject of much debate, and the research and analysis it has generated offers valuable insights into the processes of economic and social empowerment for poor women in low income developing countries. Yet as this paper notes, close observers of social change in Bangladesh have become dissatisfied with the limits of a focus on individual economic empowerment. Paid work may enable some women to negotiate the ‘structures of constraint’ that shape their lives and relationships, but what of the structures of constraint themselves? In the Bangladesh context, the experience of mass RMG employment has given rise to questions about whether women have gained greater recognition as citizens with rights and roles as carers in the private and political actors within the public spheres. Revisiting the question of women’s empowerment in this context means interrogating whether paid employment has contributed to investments in the education and skills of women and girls, improvements in their public safety and rights to occupy public space. Given labour militancy in the sector and its partial successes in raising the minimum wage, what has the experience of labour politics meant for women’s political empowerment? Drawing mainly on the rich literature available on women’s RMG employment, this paper explores the wider and less well-documented effects of such employment on public policy relating to gender equality in these areas. It concludes that the overall direction of change in the industry points plainly to the need for investments in worker productivity, with a host of implications for women’s work and gender equality more broadly. Factory owners have to date shown few signs of recognizing their interests in supporting better state health, education and public safety for women and girls, or changing management practices to retain and raise the productivity of skilled women workers. Yet with downward pressure on wages increasingly effectively resisted by workers at a time of global economic volatility and rising living costs, the tide may now be turning for the RMG workers of Bangladesh. Productivity gains require the state and the industry to treat women workers as full citizens with public policies that promote their skills and safety and respect, and which guarantee the representation of their rights and demands. RMG employment continues to be a source of empowerment for women in Bangladesh, but social and economic change means that that power now depends less on the individual economic effects of paid work on household decision-making than it once did. RMG employment is increasingly a source of power for women because of its more collective effects on women’s citizenship and political agency. This matters all the more because of how this group is exposed to the volatilities of the global economy.

Keywords: Women’s Empowerment, Export Sector, Workers of Bangladesh, Employment, self-employed in agriculture

Location: In Bangladesh

Start Date:

End Date:

Program Area: Resource Development and Management

Commodity: Labor, Employment, Income generation, Micro-finance

Objectives:

To determine the Collective Power the Women’s Empowerment among the Export Sector Workers of Bangladesh.

Methodology:

A history of the emergence and growth of the sector is available from other sources,7 so we focus here on the contemporary economic, political and social significance of the RMG sector. The history of the RMG sector in Bangladesh resembles that of most low-income country expansions into export manufacturing with the global restructuring of the garments trade, enabled by trade liberalization and low labour costs, with some local variants. Several features of the growth and development of the RMG sector are worth noting, however. It emerged initially in response to the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) in 1974, which set quotas on garments exports from the newly industrializing countries of Asia, and encouraged ‘quota-hopping’ as entrepreneurs sought to establish manufacturing sites in quota-free sites. The Korean firm Daewoo was an early entrant in Bangladesh when it came to an agreement with a Bangladeshi firm, Desh Garments, to which it trained and provided equipment (Kabeer and Mahmud 2004). The result of this shift has been that women’s wages increased much faster than men’s over the first half of the 2000s, and the gender gap in income and wages narrowed considerably, particularly at the upper end of the occupation hierarchy (Al-Samarrai 2007). This was substantially to do with the changing composition at the top end of the female labour force: of the richest 20 per cent of women, 58 per cent had been in salaried work (e.g., skilled public sector employment) and 26 per cent self-employed in agriculture in 2000; these proportions changed to 76 per cent in salaried work and only 3 per cent self-employed in agriculture in 2005 (Al-Samarrai 2007). In short, there are not only more women in paid work in Bangladesh than in the past, they are also increasingly concentrated informal sector employment. We turn now to women’s experiences as RMG workers. This section will explore two apparently contradictory issues about women’s garment work experience. The first is the tough and exploitative nature of garments work; such work has always been tough – physically demanding and featuring unsafe conditions of fire risks, sexual harassment and physical and verbal abuse. By virtue of their gender, women typically enter the industry on terms of comparative disadvantage in terms of pay, conditions and promotion prospects. Irregular wage, overtime and bonus payments have long been and remain one of the most significant problems workers face in the industry. All of this has meant that until recently, few women garments workers stayed longer than five years, with their garments career usually overlapping with their pre-and early marriage lives. Most women find it difficult to balance care work with garments employment, which involves long working days and unpredictable over-time; facilities for childcare are rare, as returns to work within the same factory after maternity. Despite such ambivalence about the social effects of RMG employment, there are good reasons to believe that the availability of RMG employment has shaped the demand for and the supply of education for girls. If this is true, it will have played a part in the rapid gains in gender equality in education. To date, and reflecting the predominance of girls and women as unskilled short-term workers, the effects have mainly been felt in basic (primary and lower secondary) education.

Source of Information: IDS WORKING PAPER, Volume 2012 No 389

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Funding Source:

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Achievement/Findings:

Women’s RMG employment marked a dramatic shift in aspects of gender relations in Bangladesh, particularly because of its mass scale. Despite the hard and exploitative nature of garments work, women and girls have gained autonomy and greater bargaining power within households. The direct effects on women workers’ lives have been varied, as women’s lives and social settings are themselves diverse; but the overall picture that emerges is one of expanded choices and gains in power. This much is already known about the effects of women’s garments work in Bangladesh. Less has been known of how – indeed, whether – RMG employment has had wider effects beyond those of individual economic empowerment. This paper draws together the fragmentary evidence available to argue that it may well have had wider impacts on society, and is beginning now to show some changes in respect of women’s citizenship and political power. Yet these gains are all relative to the other choices for women in what remains a poor, patriarchal society. RMG employment has great potential to contribute far more to gender equality in Bangladesh. It is clear, for instance, that employers have powerful interests in supporting public policies to sustain investments in the skills of the population, particularly that of girls and women. Equally, they would benefit directly from pro-poor public policies to promote urban housing, public and particularly women’s safety and freedom from harassment, improvements in urban food security, and healthcare and childcare provision. That these public policies to promote pro-poor and gender-equitable change are in the interests of the RMG sector relates above all to the direction of change in the industry. All knowledgeable observers agree that the future growth and sustainability of the industry depend now on upgrading and gains in worker productivity. This is particularly urgent in a context in which further downward pressure on wages is evidently impossible, as seen in the powerful resistance against the effective cuts in real wages that resulted from rising global food prices from 2006 onwards. Sector observers and analysts are clear that in such a context, the RMG sector’s continued progress depends substantially on its capacity to upgrade and raise productivity. To do this will self-evidently require stronger public as well as private investment in workers’ skills, starting with basic education for girls. It requires workplaces in which women are able to learn and practice their skills over time, to become more valuable and more effective workers over time. For that to occur, in addition to living and reliable wage and overtime payment, factory floors need to be more supportive of women’s care work, so that they can balance their household work with their factory work; more concerned to ensure their dignity and respect by addressing poor management practices and sexual harassment in and en route to factories; and of their rights by enabling women workers’ more meaningful dialogue and participation in policy formulation (including in education and training, public safety and transport, urban housing, safety at work); this, in turn, requires that women workers are able to aggregate and articulate their interests on issues that matter to them, and to work constructively with the women’s movement and wider civil society. The RMG sector can no longer rely on an endless stream of unskilled village girls for its workforce but needs to figure out ways of retaining skilled workers and enabling them to perform better. This in turn requires greater investment in the basic education and skills of girls and women by both state and the RMG sector. It will also require the participation of women workers in dialogue and policy formulation. The main conclusion from this review is that while an earlier phase of industrial development may have generated individual economic empowerment for women, the sector’s continued success depends in part on the extent to which women workers are and can be treated as full citizens of Bangladesh, with effective rights to personal safety and respect, and public policies that build and promote their skills and capacities. It will also depend on fuller recognition of their rights as workers and therefore to a collective voice. The process of women’s empowerment through paid work 31 in the garments industry has come of age: the demands and the needs of women workers have moved well beyond the limits of individual economic power, and into a wider but more contentious political space.

Knowledge Management: Report/Proceedings