AFP/Narsingdi, Bangladesh
In the small Bangladeshi town of Narsingdi, Suria Begum sits in a small hut, a short walk from her house, with two dozen other women where she knits children’s hats, mittens and blankets.
Like 2.5mn others in the impoverished country, Suria works in the textile business, making items exported to the US and Europe, but unlike most other workers she has not had to leave her rural home for a job.
“I have a five-year-old son so I can’t work in Dhaka, but having this job gives my family a bit of extra money. Plus, it’s nice to sit around and chat with the other workers. It’s very relaxed here,” the 30-year-old said.
Most of Bangladesh’s 4,200 garment factories, some of which come under fire from rights groups for shabby health and safety standards, are in cities like Dhaka or Chittagong, meaning workers have to move to urban areas for work.
But British woman Samantha Morshed, who created the centre where Suria works and 31 other centres like it across Bangladesh, has a different vision for the country of 144mn people, 40% of whom live below the poverty line.
“I wanted to prove that it’s not impossible to create employment in rural areas in Bangladesh,” says Morshed, who started her business four years ago by teaching a dozen women to knit and crochet in her living room in Dhaka.
Morshed represents a growing number of businesses pushing to channel Bangladesh’s cheap labour into ethical, fair trade labels.
“Bangladesh has huge potential. It’s not the sad, flooded, charity-prone place it’s made out to be,” Morshed said.
The textile trade is Bangladesh’s biggest export earner, with garments sent abroad totalling a record $12.35b in the year to June 30, 2009, but poor factory working conditions frequently hit the headlines.
An 18-year-old woman was last year “overworked to death” in the factory where she made jeans supplied to German-based retail giant Metro Group, according to a US rights group, the National Labor Committee.
Metro Group immediately terminated its contract with the supplier that used the factory.
Last year Spanish fashion firm Zara forced the closure of a supplier’s factory in Dhaka after workers said they were being abused.
According to Bangladeshi-based ECOTA Fair Trade Forum, products from its 39-member companies are worth about $29mn - or less than 1% - of those exports.
David Mayor, who owns a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, set up a training centre for garment workers 18 months ago in rural northeastern Bangladesh.
The three-month course teaches 12 women how to sew, as well as basic mathematics, English and life skills, and once they complete the training they get an internship in Mayor’s factory, with most landing jobs there afterwards.
“We wanted to be practical with the objective of giving them a job,” said Mayor, originally from Spain.
While on the course, workers make designer clothing pieces that are sold online and where customers - from Japan, Canada, France and Spain - can see the entire “DNA” of the product, including details about the woman who makes it.
Run completely separately from Mayor’s factory, the products have a huge profit margin, which goes back into the training centre.
“We are a factory. Prices are tight. Every single cent is important. We are not an NGO, but in addition we have this social concern,” Mayor said.
Stories like this are encouraging, said Rodney Reed, who moved to Bangladesh three years ago to set up a consultancy firm that encourages corporate social responsibility.
“If you have fit, healthy, well-paid workers they will make better products,” said Reed, from Britain.
“I think the private sector has the potential to solve the poverty problems here and I think there’s an opportunity to have fair trade in big factories.”
With signs that the runaway growth in the garment trade is beginning to slow because of the global financial crisis, Reed said Bangladesh could set itself apart from other garment-producing countries by becoming a fair trade hub.
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