Behind the scenes of the garment industry in Bangladesh. And the challenge of making even a modest change
In the fashion industry, a company selling a T-shirt in the UK for EUR 4.95 may spend only 95 cents on production in Bangladesh, yet it will still see to it that ‘corporate responsibility’ is written large in the headlines of its sustainability reports. How can this be?
From a feminist perspective, it is curious how in order to perform idealised gender/class identities women and men must buy cheap fashion items from primark and H&M, which are produced by low-paid factory female workers exploited by working on less than minimum wage.. This I believe is a fair starting point for any gender/class analysis of the power relations through …show more content…

Thus their work will necessarily result in gender imbalances if precautionary measures are not undertaken.
This is indeed why one of the main objectives of the project my research team for development economists Christopher Woodruff and Rocco Macchiavello from the University of Warwick, is eliminating these gender imbalances arising from women’s employment in export-oriented garment industry.
[pic]
Women garment factory workers in Bangladesh
Current statistics show that female line-operators can earn approx- 60 % of their fellow male line-operators salaries, as the men tend to have the advantage of being employed in more technically skilled jobs whereas women are stuck in low-skilled jobs due to their relatively low level of education and training. In turn, women suffer the worst from poor working conditions because they hold low-skilled jobs where occupational hazards are greater due to overcrowding, poor ventilation and inadequate fire-prevention measures – in a meeting with Mr. Zahangir, a very committed Social Compliance Manager for Sainsbury’s in Dhaka told me that there are frequent cases of female workers being trapped in factories during extra hours at night where no chiefs/supervisors are present and many die from unprevented fire accidents. Moreover, as opposed to male workers, women are mostly employed in assembly-line oriented factory work, they have to seek permission for