New York Times - Economix: Garment Factories, Changing Women’s Roles in Poor Countries
While visiting garment factories in Bangladesh on assignment recently, I met young women who had migrated from villages to the city in search of jobs that they needed to support their families back home. It is a fairly standard story in this part of the world.
What struck me, however, was how their journeys had changed them and their views about life. Take Maasuda Akthar, who moved to Gazipur, a town 30 miles outside Dhaka, when she was 16 with her sister. (I wrote about her in this article about how the Bangladesh garment industry was benefiting from increased labor costs in China.) She married a man whom she met at the factory. As an experienced seamstress, she now makes more money than him. Ms. Akthar, 21, told me that her husband had offered to become the sole breadwinner in the home so that she could stay at home and “be comfortable,” but she refused because she enjoys working. Not only that, she told me she did not plan to have children for a few years.
My conversations with Ms. Akthar and the other woman appeared to confirm what economists, policy makers and businessmen had told me: By giving women an independent source of livelihood, Bangladesh’s garment industry has changed this conservative Muslim country’s society in immeasurable ways. (More than 80 percent of the three million people who work in the industry are women.) ...
... Mr. Mobarak also found that girls who live in villages with garment factories tend to marry later and have children later than the girls who grow up in villages without factories. In other countries, this has typically happened as women get more educated, but Mr. Mobarak’s survey of 1,500 families suggests that it is happening slightly differently in Bangladesh, which has a literacy rate of just 55 percent.
“Girls do seem to take advantage of these jobs at 17 to 19 years old, and that allows them to delay marriage and child bearing,” Mr. Mobarak told me in a telephone interview. “Even if it’s not happening through education, it is happening through work.” ...... Wages in Bangladesh’s garment industry are among the lowest in the world. The minimum wage, which the government is expected to increase soon, is just 1,662 taka (about $23) a month. Labor groups are demanding a sharp increase and their protests and clashes with the police have periodically shut down factories in recent weeks.
Still hundreds of thousands of women flock to Dhaka and other garment hubs in Bangladesh every year because factories pay more than the women could earn in villages. ...
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