Garment workers suffered a nearly 35 per cent pay cut during the March-May 2020 period, losing an estimated US $ 502 million in wages even as scores of workers, including aged and pregnant women, were terminated or laid off without compensation with only the large registered garment manufacturing units availing the stimulus package to disburse wages.
This was underlined in the report titled, ‘The Weakest Link in the Global Supply Chain: How the Pandemic is Affecting Bangladesh’s Garment Workers’, conducted by the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Centre for Bangladesh Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB), in support of the UNDP Bangladesh Country Office, UNDP Business and Human Rights in Asia (B+HR Asia) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.
The study further also revealed that a staggering 82 per cent of interviewed workers’ income in April-May 2020 had declined from February 2020, 77 per cent reported difficulty of feeding all household members, while 69 per cent were forced to eat less protein-intensive foods during the period and by June the same year, export orders had fallen by 40-45 per cent compared to 2019 even if Bangladesh lost US $ 724 million in apparel exports to the United States until then.