Women workers shy away from garment industry - Labour Union leader

Young women, who are the backbone of the Sri Lankan garment industry, are increasingly avoiding this sector because of bad working conditions, labour leaders here say.

 

 

The workforce has fallen precipitously from 280,000 in 2006 to 170,000 now, forcing factory owners to adopt ingenious methods to attract more workers to save the industry which, at the last count, earned $3.7 billion in the international market.

 

 

“But attempts to get more recruits have been in vain because the word has gone around that it is better to sit at home or go the Middle East as a maid, than work in a garment factory,” Anton Marcus, Joint Secretary of the FTZ and General Services Employees Union, told Express.

 

 

A world-wide study done by Oxfam in 2005 found that garment workers in Lanka were paid less than their counterparts in India.

 

 

Overworked, poorly paid:

 

 

A Lankan worker with 10 years’ experience gets about SLRs 8,000 ($71) if she works for 30 days without a break . If she works overtime and meets productivity targets, she may make a maximum of  SLRs 14,000 ($120) per month. But to earn $120, the girls sacrifice their health.

 

 

“They skip meals to save time. They drink less water to avoid going to the toilet. The result is that their health is worse than that of women of the same age group in the general population. According to the government’s Labour Gazette of 2008, 56 per cent of the garment workers were anaemic,” Marcus said.

 

 

A Labour Department study done in 2004 found that women who worked overtime in night shifts had a higher prevalence of anaemia as compared to women of the same age group in the general population. The Body Mass Index  of garment workers showed that  34.2 per cent  were suffering from some form of chronic malnutrition.

 

 

Trade unions intimated:

 

 

No corrective steps are taken because trade unions have been throttled. “The owners get away because they have high political connections,” Marcus explains.

As a result of the non-implementation of labour laws and international labour standards, Sri Lanka recently lost the EU trade sop under the GSP Plus scheme. With the USnow taking up the issue, many Lankan product lines currently entering the US under its GSP, may get adversely affected.

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