THE Industrial Police has identified 198 apparel factories to be risky where the payment of wages and the festival allowance may remain uncertain before Eid-ul-Azha, likely to be celebrated in the first week of June. The police say that the number of factories, in the preliminary list so far, that might not pay wages and the allowance in time could finally vary. The apparel manufacturers say that they are intensively monitoring risk factors. The police data show that of the factories identified risky, 69 are members of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters’ Association, 22 are members of the Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters’ Association, 12 of them run from export processing zones and 71 apparel units fall out of the groups at hand. This has for long been an incident happening twice almost every year, with some units ultimately failing to pay the workers and the workers taking to the streets finally leaving for families in outlying areas empty-handed.
What compounds the issue is that 38 factories, members of the garment exporters’ association, are yet to pay workers their wages for April and two factories the wage for March. The police say that they are monitoring the situation so that the factories pay the workers their wages and the allowance, the National Garment Workers’ Federation, which urges action against the risky factories, hopes that the number of such factories will come down as there is still time. The federation also urges action by the authorities so that the factories would come out of their risky status. But the number of such factories coming down and the authorities making an arrangement for the payment of the workers are no solutions. The government could employ some means to resolve the crisis once or twice, but there should be a sustainable mechanism to make factories pay the workers and hold the factory owners to account if they fail to do so. Only oversight, however stringent, would hardly resolve the issue if the problems that come up in the course of monitoring are not effectively acted on and the oversight is not substantially followed up with the required action.
Whilst the government needs to act, not only monitor, to make apparel factory owners pay their workers the wages and the allowance, it should also resolve other issues such as problems of letters of credit and the supply of gas and electricity that disrupt apparel production and export.
