The second wave of the deadly coronavirus pandemic does not seem to have affected garment workers’ wages in Bangladesh as much as a recent study maintained around 58 per cent received partial wages during the first wave, the proportion of which came down to 3.2 per cent in the second wave even if around 50 per cent suffered reductions in overtime in the first wave compared to the pre-coronavirus period, while about 94 per cent apparel workers received wages on time during the second wave (April-May 2021) of the coronavirus pandemic, which was a dismal one-third in the first.
A study carried out by the Centre for Policy Dialogue or CPD — the survey was carried out amongst 500 RMG workers’ households in four districts of Chittagong, Dhaka, Narayanganj and Gazipur, in June this year — maintained this.
Presenting the findings of the survey, CPD Senior Research Fellow Towfiqul Islam Khan, reportedly, underlined that 99 workers in the surveyed households were retrenched during the pandemic, while around 67 per cent of the households said they had to borrow money due to hardships during the second wave of the pandemic while their debts were higher in the first even as the CPD Research Fellow further added it would take at least two years for the surveyed households to repay their loans or recover their lost savings.
