A new report of the labour rights group Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) has underlined that since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, as much as US $ 844 million is owed to garment workers in Bangladesh, in wages and severance pay.
Reports maintained this while adding that the CCC arrived at this figure (US $ 844 million), by collating findings of various organisations over the past year, including Mapped in Bangladesh (MiB), the ILO and the Centre for Policy Dialogue or CPD.
Several factors affecting garment manufacturers contributed to this rise in the wage gap, reportedly, maintained the report while identifying order cancellations by retailers and brands, withholding payments, raw material shortages and national lockdowns as some of those factors.
The report presents the labour group’s latest projection of the economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic on the garment workers, which underlined that garment workers lost a combined US $ 11.85 billion from March 2020 through March 2021, based on the estimated wage gaps in seven production countries, namely Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Indonesia.
Reports have it that the first ‘Un(der)Paid in the Pandemic’ report of the CCC estimated a wage gap of US $ 501 million for Bangladesh from March to May 2020, which was a period when up to 89 per cent of factories were temporarily closed even as according to research of the MiB, after the initial pandemic shock, 79 per cent of the factories in Bangladesh that had closed down reopened with 92 per cent of their workforce.
