What?

In this week’s Garment Workers Diaries blog we return to the theme of attitudes towards digital financial services as measured by customer empowerment and satisfaction.

As usual, we take care to mind the gap between female and male garment workers when it comes to feelings of positivity towards DFS. In our blog from a few weeks ago (“Cash or Bytes? Garment Workers’ Payment Preferences“) we demonstrated that female workers tend to prefer digital payments to cash payments less frequently than their male colleagues. For this week’s blog, we’ve tried to go a bit deeper to see if we can uncover any more hints as to why this might be the case.

MFO and South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM) are pleased to announce a new partnership with the international retailer Primark, that aims to strengthen the voice of garment workers throughout the company’s supply chain, in Bangladesh.

Primark is seeking to better understand the views, perspectives and workplace experiences of workers in a number of the company’s suppliers’ factories. Although the project will use MFO and SANEM’s “Garment Worker Diaries” (GWD) financial diaries methodology, whereby workers respond to a series of questions asked repeatedly over a defined period of time, this collaboration is separate to GWD and will use its own set of questions, a separate sample group, and a new and unique field team. By the completion of the project, Primark will have clearer, deeper, and direct knowledge of how workers feel and think about such topics as health and safety at the workplace, wages and bonuses, and retrenchment. The project will engage with 400 workers across various factories who will be recruited via community networks and who will be paid for their time. Finally, while the data from this project will not be made public, the project is rooted in our commitment to give voice and provide greater visibility to those who make our clothes.

Garment-producing factories in Bangladesh are the unit of analysis in this week’s Garment Worker Diaries blogs. And yes, that’s correct, we’re publishing two blogs this week, in part to make up for taking a blogging holiday this week past.

We use factories as the unit of analysis less often and with great caution. One of the reasons we take such care analyzing factory-specific data is that factory names are notoriously difficult to verify. To that end, we’re publishing “What We Can Learn From Bangladeshi Factory Names“, written by our guest blogger Jonah Tauber who interned with us over the Summer. We hope that his blog will be able to accurately demonstrate for you some of the elemental frustration trying to standardize factory names creates!

In our second blog, we take a look at the evolution of digital pay within factories. Analyzing six months of data from April to September has yielded some interesting trends and possible correlations. As many factories begin reverting to cash wage payments since their unprecedented adoption of digital wage payments, it will be important to ask why this digital evolution was not longer-lived.

In MFO’s most recent blog post at workerdiaries.org MFO and SANEM bring the Garment Worker Diaries study up to date in Bangladesh for a full seven months from April through October. What we are finding is that for most garment workers life and work is continuing its slow return to pre-COVID times.

One thing this means is that cash payments (whether factory wages or financial transactions among workers) are regaining territory that digital payments had carved out in the wake of the pandemic. Worker illness, injury and food insecurity are also trending down in October. Most workers are paying their rent on time.

In an effort to understand even more how COVID-19 is affecting workers and what they know about, this month we began asking workers COVID-specific questions, which we’ll continue asking from now on. You can find the workers’ responses to our questions near the end of this week’s blog.