What does the future for Afghan women hold?

I just watched this video on the BBC about women’s rights in Afghanistan and how “campaigners fear that the advances made by women over the past decade could be reversed, if a peace deal is done with the Taliban.” As long as “women, and their concerns, are not sidelined at the upcoming Bonn conference” garment work could be a means of helping women become empowered.

It’s encouraging and interesting to see how an industry usually associated with human rights violations, could have a positive impact on the lives of women in Afghanistan, if conducted in a fair and equal way.

Stitched up

We already know that women producing clothes for UK brands are working 14 hours a day for poverty pay in countries such as India, Bangladesh etc. This has been given more clout from International NGO War on Want, in a new research which interviewed 1,000 female employees from 41 factories supplying western retailers, many of them British. Some 85 per cent of Bangladeshi garment workers are women. This also comes out around the time the People newspaper publishes allegations that Bangladeshi workers making one of Kate Middleton’s favourite brands, Zara, earn under 6p an hour for night shifts. Read the full report from War on Want here.

Trapped

Who knows what a Sumangali means? Neither did I. Sumangali in Tamil means an unmarried girl becoming a respectable woman by entering into marriage.

In some parts of India, the bride’s parents have to provide the groom’s family with a dowry (gift of money); they also have to pay for the wedding. If the bride’s family cannot do all of this then she will be treated badly after marriage. If she then get’s married at all because some families will just say no.

One way for families and girls to get around this issue is for them to get into a Sumangali scheme aka ‘marriage assistance system’. Under the Sumangali scheme, poor families are encouraged by brokers to sign their daughters up to work in a garment factory for three years. After the three years the family get money to help pay for the wedding costs and dowry.

Some girls get treated well but for most this ‘scheme’ is like a trap. The girls are seen as the property of the factory or the broker. According to research by the Centre for Education and Communication in India, girls are often forced to work up to 12 hours a day, live in hostels with few facilities and are paid a very low wage.

The worst thing is some factories fire the girls just before they are to complete their contracts so they don’t get the money they were promised at the end.

The money is usually around 30,000 to 50,000 rupees which is between £400-700. The legal minimum wage is 140 rupees. Which means the workers should be receiving 80,000 rupees – not including over time.

One of the reason factories are trapping young women into forced labour like this is because factories can’t produce the volume of clothes that is demanded from shoppers from the developed part of the world. This has created a labour shortage and factories need to keep workers longer, whether they like it or not.

You can change all this, it’s simple. Just find different ways of wearing clothes so we don’t increase demand. If its new clothes you want, pop down to a vintage store or see how you can make something new out of something you already have. There are plenty of ways to do something different. There is currently a huge campaign to get Asian countries to unite against low wages and poor working conditions. It’s called the Asia Floor Wage campaign.

Our clothes don’t have to be made from the hands of trapped and pressured women.

Image Credit- Nishant Lalwani for The Asian Foundation for Philanthropy 

Candle Light Vigil

Has your manager ever threatened to kill you if you didn’t do the photocopying?


Or have you ever been so frustrated at work that you felt like killing yourself?

A few weeks ago AFP received an email from one of their partner organisations, Cividep, who are based in Bangalore. A 17 year old girl, Roopa, had been killed. We have now been informed that she had been burnt alive. Local authorities have registered the case as murder under Indian law.

This case is not the first of its kind. Last year a girl named Ammu was found dead in the lavatory of a well-known factory. And in another case a woman named Renuka committed suicide at home, allegedly due to harassment at work.

Nearly 80 per cent of the 500,000 garment workers in Bangalore are women, and although child labour is against the law, you still see children in factories sewing, knitting and carrying supplies from on place to another.

Every day, in every factory, female workers are under the threat of violence and harassment at the hands of male supervisors and managers. They have been known to throw garments at workers faces, physically pushing them sometimes by their neck and are made subject to verbal abuse.

Cividep, who works closely with the workers, believe these deaths are related to the bad treatment suffered by the young women.

The candle light vigil of today is in condolence to Roopa and all the other women who have suffered in these factories. Something needs to be done but for today please have Roopa in your thoughts.

Image Credit- kkalyan on Flickr at Creative Commons 

Women need to work harder!

“Women in developing countries need to work harder!” was something I overheard on the train today morning. And it got me thinking…

Women now have the freedom to choose what they wear; who they vote for and what job they do regardless of their gender. The developed world has come very far in providing equality to both sexes. However the developing world is still struggling for equal opportunities.

In India 75% of the garment workforce is made up of women. Due to the nature of the work men tend not to like to get involved in traditionally feminine roles of knitting and sewing. The women’s work goes unrecognized and underpaid. The cost of the average men’s jacket is £30, only 10p of that £30 will go to the garment worker. This is not enough to sufficiently support a family.

Another thing is that the garment workers are mothers and their priority is their children, which means they feed their children first, even if that doesn’t leave much food for them. This leads to poor health and shorter life expectancy. This indirectly makes the women the breadwinners and the ones in-charge. So the women are often found juggling motherhood, garment worker and housewife duties all at the same time, with no decent pay-off at the end.

“Women do two thirds of the world’s work, receive 10 percent of the world’s income and own 1 percent of the means of production.”- Richard H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999).

Is it me or does this sound like not much has changed for women on the other side of the world? If women should see more fruits from their labour then equality should be for everyone, not just for a select few…