Health and Safety Compliance in the Readymade Garment Sector of Bangladesh: Practices and Observations

Abstract

Bangladeshi RMG accounts for the second-largest apparel manufacturer and exporter after China. The readymade garment (RMG) industry is considered as the backbone of Bangladesh’s economy and is one of the key core drivers as far as the strength of the GDP is concerned. The key features of the RMG industry determines three assumptions firstly, that the RMG hub is a strong buyer-driven production chain; secondly, RMG thrives in this part of the world because of greater availability and accessibility of “cheap” labor pool, low wages and reluctance to unionization; thirdly, that the relations between the State and industry are governed to some extent by clientelism. Over the last decades, the growth of the sector has been spectacular. Currently, there are more than 5,000 garment manufacturing firms operating in Bangladesh. The RMG sector is accountable for creating employment for more than 4 million people. The garment industry of Bangladesh has very significant contributions to the country’s development process in terms of foreign earnings, employment opportunities, women empowerment and bringing various other social changes. Despite all of these success and holistic development thanks to the RMG sector there are grey areas which are seldom looked at by the garment owners and policy makers, health and safety procedures are hardly given importance by the policy makers and parties associated to this industry. The working conditions in RMG factories have been repeatedly characterized by the Western media as prone to the workers due to the occurrence of violence and intense workload (Bajaj, 2010; Ethirajan, 2012; Yardley, 2012).