Bangladesh urged to stop worker abuse in garment industry
Workers found in Bangladesh's garment industry deal with increased threats, intimidation and even physical and sexual misuse, according to a report for a great influential US Senate committee that urged authorities to accomplish more to protect labour rights.
The study for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations discovered that while factory safety had improved since the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, Bangladesh was backsliding on workers' rights, reports Reuters.
"Today, a lot of Bangladesh's ready-made garment factory buildings are structurally safer, but the workers inside are not," said the survey, released by the Democrat Senator Bob Menendez.
"Labour rights possess declined precipitously in recent years as union organisers cope with pressure on freedoms to associate, organise, and demonstrate. Worse, workers are staying abused - verbally, physically, and sexually."
A good senior official with the labour ministry denied there had been any backsliding on labour legal rights, but said there is room for improvement.
Bangladesh, which ranks at the rear of only China as a good supplier of dresses to Western countries, depends on the garment sector for a lot more than 80 percent of it has the exports, and about 4 million jobs.
Many leading Western fashion brands produce clothing in Bangladesh and the industry has been in global scrutiny since the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed seven years ago, killing 1,134 people.
"We want to use the international network," explained K.M. Ali Azam, secretary at the Ministry of Labour and Career, promising to truly have a "detailed debate" with factory owners on the report's findings.
"We could have a dialogue regarding this record and focus on including the ideas that are possible to include," he told the Thomson Reuters Base on Monday.
US experts travelled to Dhaka on July to talk with Bangladeshi garment employees, union activists, government officials and civil society representatives for the study, published last week.
They found union leaders faced threats and intimidation, hampering their ability to investigate claims of abuse, the majority of that have been from women employees who make up a lot of the workforce in Bangladesh's garment industry.
Azim said there had been no recent studies of major misuse of women workers.
The analysis comes amid concern over the ending on, may 31 of a mechanism led by European fashion brands that has been credited with bettering working conditions in a lot more than 1,000 factories in Bangladesh.
It'll be replaced by an exclusive monitoring entity, RMG Sustainability Council, which will be made up of factory owners, union leaders and brand owners.
