‘Our Backs Are Against the Wall’: The Story of a Bangladeshi Woman Garment Worker in the COVID-19 ‘New Normal’

Abstract

This article introduces Rayat, a woman garment worker in Bangladesh. It traces how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated precariousness in the garment value chain and deepened the fragility of Rayat and other garment workers on the frontline. In the article, Rayat explains how her work, household and livelihood changed in response to COVID-19. Her story highlights the importance of contextual influences, distinct industry dynamics and temporal factors, within both workplace and domestic spheres. In complex ways, these dynamics shaped how workers were positioned in the value chain, exploited in the labour process and constrained in their agency.

Introduction

The garment industry of Bangladesh was the second largest supplier to the global garment industry in 2020, and garment exports comprised 80% of Bangladesh’s total exports (Anner, 2022). While the industry provides employment and earning opportunities to women in export industries in the Global South, women workers labour under precarious conditions with low wages, a lack of occupational health and safety, workplace violence and high work intensity (Ahmed and Uddin, 2022; Akhter et al., 2019). The global garment industry’s fast fashion model, which has flourished in the 21st century, is characterized by frequent production cycles per year, ever-shorter lead times for suppliers, downward pressure on workers’ wages and increased worker precarity (Ayaz et al., 2019; Hammer and Plugor, 2019).

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the vulnerability of garment workers (Voss, 2020). In early 2020, buyers cancelled in-process orders and delayed payments to suppliers in Bangladesh, which caused more than a million workers either to lose their jobs or be furloughed without financial support from the factory owners. Workers who retained their jobs experienced reduced working hours, income reduction, wage theft and oppression (Anner, 2022). The pandemic has increased the time poverty of women with intensified unpaid care and domestic work, compelling workers at the bottom of the value chain to reorganize their productive and reproductive lives (Stevano et al., 2021). In this article, we hear from Rayat, a woman garment worker in Dhaka, who reflects on the constraints and the choices she and her family face, and how her work, household and livelihood evolved in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through Rayat’s lived experience of the pandemic, the article contributes to existing scholarship on the impact of the pandemic on the world of work. Several authors portray the pandemic as a combined economic and health crisis. During the crisis, workers encountered a combination of work intensification and idleness. ‘On-the-shop floor’ workers faced elevated risks of virus exposure, declining occupational health and safety standards, unequal access to protective equipment and medical treatment, along with mental strain stemming from prolonged isolation, the blending of work and home boundaries, and (the fear of) potential job loss (Cai et al., 2021; Wickramasinghe and De Neve, 2022).

This article extends pre-existing work by drawing attention to garment workers (such as Rayat) in export processing zones (EPZs) in the Global South during the pandemic. It highlights the importance of contextual influences, distinct industry dynamics and temporal factors, within both workplace and domestic spheres. Rayat’s story illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic led to exploitation in the labour process, severely restricted women’s labour agency and negatively impacted work conditions and social reproduction in the context of capitalist production in the Global South.

Crisis of production and reproduction in global value chains and local labour regimes

Recent research into the effects of COVID-19 on labour emphasizes that the pandemic led to a further entrenchment of capitalist productive relations, provoking a crisis in the world of work and the sphere of social reproduction (Jaga and Ollier-Malaterre, 2022; Mezzadri, 2022a). First, workers experienced increased precarity, lay-offs, and often had to navigate between periods of extreme work intensification and idleness due to the rapid opening and closing of workplaces (Cai et al., 2021). Second, some had more direct exposure to the virus through physical interaction with customers (e.g. in supermarkets), while others engaged in remote work at home. An associated effect was the intrusion of work-life into home-life with increased mental strain and stress, as workers juggled online work and childcare duties (Sun et al., 2023). In addition, studies show that workers from ethnic and racial minorities often had less access to, awareness of, or could not afford medical treatment (Cai et al., 2021; Stevano et al., 2021). At the same time, workers were increasingly facing moral dilemmas, such as whether health workers should strike when patients are dying in hospital (Li and Ng, 2022). Finally, the effect of the pandemic also had a distinct North–South dimension. For instance, work guidelines often assume that workers are employed in formal workplaces, whereas the vast majority of workers in the Global South are employed in informal sector jobs with limited access to protective equipment and medical treatment (Jaga and Ollier-Malaterre, 2022).

Feminist political economy scholarship highlights that the crisis reshaped both the organization of production and the reproduction of households and global labour markets (Mezzadri, 2022b). This reflects key concerns raised in earlier writings on the participation of women in global value chains. On the one hand, authors underline that women workers in the Global South often increase their earnings by working in export-oriented industries, while working outside the home tends to help women gain greater self-confidence and self-reliance (Said-Allsopp and Tallontire, 2015). On the other hand, changing global demand and local patriarchal, family and kinship patterns also lead to the incorporation of women into global value chains on adverse terms. In fact, feminist scholars refer to the inherent links between export factories and the gendered nature of the wider social and economic relations of particular locations (Barrientos, 2019; Ruwanpura, 2011; Werner, 2012) in ways that acknowledge both the variability in gendered labour regimes at the global-local nexus (Bair, 2010) and ‘the multiple places of labour and the intersection of social relations that shape women’s geographies of work’ (Dutta, 2019: 888). In this way, gender, as a set of socially constructed meanings and practices, must be conceptualized as part of the macrostructure of the global economy and its systemic logic of capital accumulation (Bair, 2010). Finally, the literature underscores the agency of women workers, highlighting how they engage in ‘micro-scale struggles’, as they negotiate work conditions and household relations in order to gain greater control over their bodies and labour (Carswell and De Neve, 2013; Dutta, 2019).

In light of this wider literature, Rayat’s experience offers insights into perspectives and scenarios at a personal level, which can present an alternative way of interpreting these larger narratives. In understanding Rayat’s story, it is critical, first, to acknowledge the temporal dimensions of the crisis, which have direct implications for the labour process and the labour agency of women garment workers in Bangladesh. The labour process is characterized by an initial loosening of managerial control and slow-down in the pace of work, followed by tightened managerial control and increasing the pace of work as the pandemic evolves into its second phase in the summer of 2020.

Second, in addition to the temporal dimension of the impacts of the crisis on Rayat’s work and life, her experience is also closely bound by the structure of Bangladesh’s garment industry. Bangladesh is heavily dependent on export-oriented garment production for employment and its economy lacks diversification. Thus, there are few significant income-generating alternatives (Anner, 2022). In short, the structure of Bangladesh’s economy and garment industry limit the possibilities for exercising labour agency for women workers such as Rayat.

Third, the institutional context in Bangladesh affected the ways in which Bangladeshi garment workers were impacted by and experienced the crisis. Rayat works in an EPZ. The broader EPZ literature highlights that governments establish EPZs to promote foreign direct investment and exports, often by weakening the protection of workers’ rights (ILO, 2017). In Bangladesh, EPZs generate significant employment opportunities for women workers, but trade union activity is prohibited in these zones (Kabir et al., 2022). Workers can form Worker Welfare Associations (WWAs) to represent them on disputes, negotiate collective bargaining contracts and collect membership dues. However, WWAs can neither interact nor affiliate with any trade union, NGO or political organization outside the EPZ. They are, therefore, often considered less effective in protecting worker rights (Khan and Brymer, 2020). This institutional context is critical in detailed explorations of the lives of workers, both at the workplace and in their living spheres.

Working lives and constrained spaces for labour agency

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the well-documented exploitation of garment workers in Bangladesh. Existing workplace and labour process scholarship details how employers exert various forms of coercive control through domination and control of the labour process (e.g. Ahmed and Uddin, 2022). Widespread misuse of power in recruitment, employment contracts, task allocation, wage determination, performance evaluation and violence against women garment workers is prevalent (Akhter et al., 2019). Through work intensification, disciplining and suppressing unionization, employers coerce workers into working long hours. Participation in the value chain, particularly the fast-fashion business model employed by major retailers, forces local factories to accept orders with shorter lead times to outbid local and international competitors, further weakens workers’ protection while employers recover costs through intensive labour processes (Ayaz et al., 2019).

Rayat’s story illustrates how the pandemic intensified the exploitation of women in the labour process and further restricted the very limited space of women workers to articulate and defend their interests. Yet, in recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis in the extant literature on not only portraying women workers in export-oriented production as victims, or factor inputs to production, but to recognize that women workers do have options for influencing their work situation even in the worst of circumstances (Anner, 2022). Labour agency refers to both the ability of workers to defend their interests through informal, personal and micro-level decision-making processes and more formally through trade union participation (Carswell and De Neve, 2013). A distinction can be made between different forms of labour agency: (a) resilience, the small acts through which workers cope with everyday realities without challenging the status quo; (b) reworking, which involves workers seeking to reform the existing system in ways that redistribute resources and improve work conditions; and (c) resistance, in which workers challenge the capitalist world system by developing alternative production and social reproduction systems that give them greater control of their labour time and its usage (Cumbers et al., 2010; Katz, 2004).

Rayat’s story does not involve resistance or reworking, but resilience is evidenced by acts of ‘getting by’. This includes survival strategies, such as obtaining credit from the local grocery store, enduring work intensification and verbal abuse in the factory, and buying her husband a rickshaw so that he may pursue an alternative livelihood after he loses his factory job. She chooses to remain in the sphere of production, which denotes a specific workplace where profit-generating activities occur, usually beyond individual households. In contrast, other workers are fired or ‘opt out’ by resigning. Yet, as she also explains, her earnings are below the cost of social reproduction; that is, they do not allow her to regenerate the possibilities of human life and thus labour power (see also, Mezzadri, 2022a).

Introducing Rayat

Rayat is a garment worker in Dhaka, Bangladesh, who had been working in the industry for 11 years in 2020. She was one of the fortunate workers who retained her job during the pandemic, although there is limited to no job security for workers. For instance, even if workers are guaranteed advance notice prior to lay-offs and unemployment benefits in their contracts, such contractual obligations are routinely violated. Nevertheless, Rayat confronted challenges due to the intensifying precariousness in her productive (e.g. managerial control at the factory floor, reduced income) and reproductive work (e.g. debt, health, childcare).

We interviewed Rayat twice in the summer of 2020 (June and July) as the worst and first lockdown was coming to an end, and again in January 2021. She was 28 at the time. The interviews were conducted by telephone. We obtained her number from a labour rights trainer from what Rayat calls the ‘Solidarity Centre’, run by a development NGO in Bangladesh. The interviews were conducted in Bengali by one of the co-authors who is bilingual. Accuracy was ensured by recording the interviews and the interviewer creating a full English language transcription within three days. Even though she was busy with work at the factory and her household responsibilities in the daytime, Rayat agreed to talk to us at night with the intention that people should know how garment workers were struggling to survive during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We spoke to Rayat at different points during the pandemic to capture how capitalist control affected her livelihood and how she had been coping with such adverse conditions by employing resilience mechanisms. At the time of the first interview, Rayat was living with her husband and two sons – one 13 years old and the other aged 14 months – near one of the EPZs in Dhaka. Her husband, also a garment worker, lost his job at the beginning of the pandemic. When we caught up with Rayat again in January 2021, she was pregnant with her third child, and in the meantime she had bought a rickshaw for her husband to supplement their meagre income.

Our backs are against the wall – Rayat’s story

I had a dream that I would become a police officer. It did not happen. So, after Class 10, I came to Dhaka and joined this factory. It is my destiny to work here, so I continue. I am a sewing machine operator at a factory in an EPZ. We make jersey tops, sports jerseys and night dresses. Working in the garment industry is hard. I go to the factory very early in the morning, and after coming home, I cook for my family, have my dinner and go straight to bed. We don’t even see the sun! We are like broiler chickens, always sitting under the electric lights.

I know negative thinking is harmful for me, and I cannot survive if I think negatively. But I am worried that corona (coronavirus [COVID-19]) might take us back to the situation where we were a long time ago. In our village, people often had no food to feed their children. So, they got their girls married to much older men who already had three to four wives. People used to commit crimes because of hunger. That situation has changed now because of the garment industry. Low-income families do not send their girls to other people’s houses or get them married. Instead, they send them to work in a factory. And after working in the garment industry, I guess that three in four girls from low-income families are in a better economic situation. They can earn now.

Women who come to work in the garment industry also become smart. I did not know how to use a mobile phone, but now I know many things. People learn things when they come to the city to work in a factory. I would say that our people, especially women from the village, are economically independent because of working in the garment industry. Bangladesh is also more developed due to the garment industry. However, right now, I do not think the situation will improve. Instead, it is getting worse day by day.

Before the pandemic, it was normal to be a little afraid of being fired, but I had confidence that they could not fire me easily. Especially after going to the Solidarity Centre seminar, I realized that I have some rights. They cannot just fire me. If the manager complains about me, I will not get the golden bonus. ¹ That is all they would do. If workers talk back, they will not give the workers their bonus or wage increases. Once, it happened to me that I had to stand my ground. I was pregnant with my youngest child. I was in pain and got sick leave for three days. After six days, I returned to the factory, but I had another doctor’s appointment in the evening. The doctor thought that I might have a tumour. I told my manager that I can work today but must leave for the doctor’s appointment at 4.30 p.m. When I was leaving the manager got angry and shouted at me. I said, ‘Okay, I am going now, and will come back tomorrow. If you will not let me work here anymore, that is fine. This is important for me.’ Next day at work they did not say anything. My manager just said, ‘Well, you have a lot of work on your table, so just go and do the work’. The situation has changed now. Workers are afraid of losing their jobs. We hear a lot of workers are losing their jobs every day in other factories.

In March 2020, the factory management informed us about the coronavirus. They did not tell us about any safety measures and suddenly closed the factory two days later, on 26 March. They opened the factory again on 4 April without any safety measures. We were concerned about our safety and asked the management why they opened the factory without any safety precautions. They did not address our concerns but mentioned the possibility of another lockdown. After two days, the factory closed again. On 25 April, our factory reopened, but there was no social distancing. They did not even provide us with soaps, facial masks or hand sanitizers. Our managers and supervisors wore full personal protective equipment, like gloves and glasses, but we had nothing. We raised this with the human resource manager, but he said, ‘You have to get your own protection. We don’t have any responsibility for your protection.’ It was not until a month later that the management ensured social distancing and provided a sink for us to wash our hands. They said we should wash our hands every 20 minutes, but how could I possibly do that?! The supervisor is always in front of me, putting pressure on me to work faster. So how is that possible? It worries me because corona could also affect our family if we do not get a chance to protect ourselves from the virus.

I got my regular wage in March 2020, but only got 60% of my wages in April because the factory was closed for more than a month due to the lockdown. That calculation is without my seniority wage increments or usual overtime. During May and June my wages were lower than normal because there was no overtime, increment or any benefit. That is when my husband lost his job as well. The factory management sent him on furlough and eventually fired him. He did not get the amount that he was rightfully owed from his employer. The factory management said the furlough was the reason he was paid less. I got my Eid bonus, ² but it was not enough. The sudden fall in income caused huge economic problems for my family. We had to pay our rent of 3000–4000 taka and pay 4000 taka to the woman who takes care of my son while I am at work. We also had expenses for food and other things. How could I manage everything with the 6000 taka that I got in April?

Later in the summer of 2020, huge numbers of workers are still being fired every day. The managers were looking very closely for workers’ faults so that they could fire them. In the EPZ where I work, many women workers are being fired. There might have been 350 workers fired in three days. They are especially firing workers who have been working for a long time, because they have higher seniority and higher wages. In my factory, they are firing people every day. Recently, one woman cried a lot when they fired her because her husband was also unemployed. ‘How could I survive?’, she said. It was just before Eid, so I lent her some money to buy sweets for her children. In my husband’s factory, 700 workers got fired, and 700 more are on furlough. There is no account, no figure for how many workers the factories are firing. There is nothing we can do. Though we go to the Solidarity Centre and are more conscious of our rights than before, we cannot do much because we do not have a WWA in our factory. I heard that there used to be a WWA in this factory a long time ago, but the Bangladesh EPZ Authority and the owners of the factories closed it down and introduced a Worker Participation Committee (WPC) instead. The owners completely control the WPC, while the WWA used to help the workers.

I am in a very tight economic situation now in July 2020. My husband is still unemployed. The three of us – myself, my husband and my 13-year-old child – can survive without eating, but our little one cannot. It is not possible to maintain my family on my income alone. I am sick and have to spend money on my treatment for a stomach tumour. How can I pay our rent? How can I spend enough money on food? We are in a tough situation here in Dhaka but returning to our village is not an option. We do not have any employment options there. How could we survive? How could we raise my children? How could we feed my mother-in-law, brother-in-law and sister-in-law? We are surviving in Dhaka by buying groceries on credit. I can buy groceries that may cost 5000 taka, but I pay 2000 taka and tell the shop owner that I will pay the remaining 3000 taka next month when I get my wages. We are struggling to feed our children.

In this corona situation, nobody goes to the village, and nobody comes from the village. Otherwise, in this situation my family would give us some rice, lentils and other things from the village, but now it is impossible because of the restrictions. I could do tailoring at night for extra income like I used to, but everyone is in a tight economic situation. Nobody wants new clothes.

Since the lockdown in 2020, the work pressure has been increasing significantly. The factory owner said that while we were staying at home, the company made a huge loss and we have to make it up to him. Before corona, we had to sew 60–80 pieces per hour. Now it is 100–120 pieces. We work 10 hours’ work in eight hours, and they have stopped giving us overtime pay.

During the 11 years I have worked in the factory, we have always done overtime except in November and December because there is less work in those months. It was not a problem. It was only two months. But this year, it has been almost a full year without overtime and overtime pay. We have lots of work pressure. Orders are coming frequently, but we also hear the news of many big factories shutting down. So, there is no guarantee that my factory will not shut down in the future. Therefore, we try our best to meet the target. We have no other option. When I realize that I do not have enough time to meet my target, I stop taking breaks and do not go to the toilet. It is very hard. I sit in the morning and only stand up when I finish my work. The worst part is that one of my colleagues who was three months’ pregnant had a miscarriage four months ago [suspected to be] because of holding her bladder for such a long time. If a worker makes even one piece less than the target, the supervisors misbehave and scold them. We cannot bear it anymore. Our backs are against the wall. Many new workers left their jobs. They could not tolerate this. We, who have been working for a long time, tolerate it because we have no option. The management puts pressure on the supervisor, and the supervisor shouts at us. I cannot repeat the bad words they use.

It did not use to be like this. Our previous line manager treated us well. When there was a shipment deadline, he used to say: ‘Finish the production by tomorrow and then relax for one or two days’. When there was no strict date of shipment, he sometimes told us to work in a relaxed way. To be honest, we were happy, and we used to work as he wanted. But now our manager misbehaves with us, threatens us and uses very harsh words, and suspends workers for no reason. We do not protest or respond. They misbehave with women more. They cannot misbehave with men. If they talked like that to the men, they would talk back because they have other options. But women, we shut our mouths since we have family, children and not many options when it comes to finding jobs.

Now, nine months after the first lockdown, I am still struggling to survive on my lower income. My husband did not find a job. I borrowed 20,000 taka and took 20,000 taka as a loan from my provident fund to buy a rickshaw for him. He is pulling the rickshaw only at night because my youngest child is often sick, and my husband needs to take care of him. When I get home from work, he goes out with the rickshaw and stays on the streets until 1 a.m. That is how our days are now. There is no option to sit idle in Dhaka.