Garment Factory Workers Research Articles

Transition to Adulthood of Female Garment-Factory Workers in Bangladesh

This article examines data from a study on garment-factory workers in Bangladesh to explore the implications of work for the early socialization of young women. For the first time, large numbers of young Bangladeshi women are being given an alternative to lives in which they move directly from childhood to adulthood through early marriage and childbearing. Employment creates a period of transition in contrast to the abrupt assumption of adult roles at very young ages that marriage and childbearing mandate. This longer transition creates a period of adolescence for young women working in the garment sector that is shown to have strong implications for the women's long-term reproductive health.

Factory as Home and Family: Female Workers in the Moroccan Garment Industry

The study of women's participation in factory labor must be focused on the specific ways in which women all over the world experience, interpret and give meaning to their work on the shop floor. Over the past two decades, garment manufacture has become a major export industry in Morocco and females have provided the labor power for the industry's growth. In conducting an ethnographic study of Moroccan garment factory workers, I found that workers sought to imbue the factory with their most cherished cultural values, thus transforming the factory rather than allowing the factory to transform them. Central to these values is each worker's identity as daughter, sister, and perhaps wife and mother in a patriarchal family. In their effort to preserve this valued notion of themselves as kinswomen, workers transform the workshop floor into an interior space, recast factory staff into family members, and operate in the factory as they would in the household. Thus, the factory becomes a uniquely Moroccan space, and workers find meaning in their labor there. However, in their perpetuation of treasured notions of self, home, family and gender inside the factory, workers render themselves more amenable to the factory's exploitation.

Vitamin A deficiency among adolescent female garment factory workers in Bangladesh.

To investigate the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency among adolescent female factory workers in Bangladesh, and examine the association between various factors and vitamin A status. A cross-sectional study. Garment factories in Dhaka city, Bangladesh. Three hundred and eighty eight adolescent girls aged 12-19 y from ten garment factories were selected randomly for the present study. Information on socio-economic conditions and usual pattern of dietary intake were obtained by interview. Anthropometric data and blood samples were collected following the interview. By NCHS reference standard, 15.5% of the participants were thin (< 90% Wt/Ht) and about 7% overweight (> 120% Wt/Ht). In about 56%, serum vitamin A level was below the adequate level of 1.05 mumol/l, with 14% having vitamin A deficiency (< 0.70 mumol/l). Forty four per cent of the participants were found to be anaemic (haemoglobin < 120 g/l). Food frequency data on vitamin A rich foods revealed that a large percentage of the participants do not take eggs (41%), milk (64%), liver (85%) and sweet pumpkin (85%); while about 40% of the girls take dark green leafy vegetables (DGLV) and 17% take small fish at least four servings a week. The girls who consumed four or more servings per week of DGLV had significantly higher serum vitamin A level than the girls who took three servings or less. There was a significant positive association between the level of serum vitamin A and frequency of intake of DGLV (r = 0.12; P = 0.023). When age, level of education, percapita income, haemoglobin concentration, serum protein concentration, menstruation at the time of blood collection, prevalence of current morbidity, frequency of intake of egg, milk, small fish, DGLV, liver and sweet pumpkin were accounted for by multiple regression analysis, a strong relationship was found for serum vitamin A concentration with age, menstruation, haemoglobin level and frequency of intake of DGLV. For every unit change in the frequency of consumption of DGLV, there was 0.013 mumol/l change in serum vitamin A level whilst taking other factors into account. The data show that there is a high prevalence of subclinical vitamin A deficiency among the adolescent female garment factory workers in Bangladesh, although the anthropometric indices suggest that they do not suffer from acute under nutrition. Consumption of DGLV appears to have an important relation with the vitamin A status of these girls.

The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework

Although the last decade of research on families has contributed enormously to our understanding of diversity in family structures and the relationship of family units to various other aspects of social life, it has, it seems to me, generally failed to identify and address sources of conflict within family life. Thus, the usefulness of this research for understanding women's situation has been particularly limited. The persistence and resilience of family forms in the midst of general social change, often forcefully documented in this research, have certainly helped to goad us, as feminists, to consider what women's interests may be in the mainte-