In a recent study, which interviewed 400 garment workers across nine countries, the
Worker Rights Consortium found that even those employees who managed to hold
onto their jobs reported a 21% decrease in income between March and August 2020 –
with monthly wages falling from $187 to $147.
It is a scenario that Kalpona Akter recognised: “Workers are not getting overtime and
in many factories they have been told ‘we are not paying the minimum wage, if you
want to work, work, if not – leave’.”
Garment worker families in Bangladesh are now having to make impossible choices
to survive. “When they get full wages, 30% goes on housing – it’s not a dream house,
it’s a ten-by-ten concrete room, sometimes with no window,” Kalpona explains.
“Losing 20% means they are substituting their food and their children’s food because
they still need to pay for where they live. Instead of having 70% left, they have 50%
left and that means they are starving.”
Across the sea in Sri Lanka, labour rights advocates paint a similar picture of lost
earnings. “Workers live for those wages – it is their main source of income,” said
Abiramy Sivalogananthan of the Asia Floor Wage Alliance. She explained that many
workers in Sri Lanka’s vast free trade zones are migrant workers who support not just
themselves but their families in rural villages.
Most garment workers in Sri Lanka also lost their critical December bonus of an
additional month’s wage. “The bonus is really important,” Abiramy explained.
“Workers usually have plans for that bonus even at the beginning of the year - like
they will pay o their debts.”
‘Super winners’
The pandemic has also created di culties for fashion retailers. In Europe and North
America major retailers – including Philip Green’s Arcadia, the group behind brands
including Topshop, Burton and Miss Selfridge – have collapsed. In the US alone, an
estimated 20,000-25,000 physical shops have closed down. According to a recent