Already under stress due to falling profit margins and rising overheads, the recent hike in workers’ wages has come as a major challenge for the garment makers, who have long been demanding fair pricing to ensure business sustainability.
This demand of Bangladesh garment exporters was reiterated once again by the country’s Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi recently.
As per media reports, Munshi during a meeting with Netherlands Ambassador to Bangladesh Harry Verweij in Dhaka recently reportedly underlined that RMG factories have been modernised along with the wage hike of labourers which required huge investment, but price of RMG did not increase in line with it.
“So, fixing up the logical price of RMG is necessary,” reportedly stated Bangladesh Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi while underlining that Netherlands is an important market for Bangladeshi RMG.
It may be mentioned here that sometime back, Bangladesh’s envoy to the United Kingdom too stressed the issue of fair pricing to drive home the message that better price is a must to attain higher compliance standards, which is increasingly becoming the order of the day.
“Bangladesh’s RMG sector needs fair pricing so that the apparel industries can fully comply with higher standard…For ensuring the higher standard, which is a major challenge, the RMG sector needs to be paid more. 85 per cent of the garment factories in Bangladesh have already met the international standard, as assessed by Accord and Alliance — the two international organisations of major global retailers,” said Saida Muna Tasneem, Bangladesh High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.
Tasneem said this while delivering a speech at the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff as part of the discussion on a study titled “Bangladesh – a golden journey to development.”
