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Women’s employment in the textile manufacturing sectors of Bangladesh and Morocco and immoral, or at least suspected of being so, because they worked with men; they did not respect and obey their family elders. Some other criticisms of the conduct of women garment workers are highlighted by the remarks of the brother-in-law of a garment worker in Comilla. According to him, the negative views reduced the value of unmarried women garment workers within the “marriage market” of the sending community. There are many who don’t want to marry a girl who has worked in garments, because the environment is not good. Such a girl will not be attentive to the needs of the household (shongshari). We see the girls who come back to visit; they are different. They are not shy in front of people, they know how to talk to outsiders. They speak in good Bengali (shuddho bangla). When my sister-in-law comes home, she spends all her time outside the house. She wears salwar kameez, not saris. There are some neighbours (para protibeshi) who say the girls who work in garmentare bad, evil (shoytan). Community perspectives on women’s garment work were not, however, only negative. The women’s move into garment work could be justified by the evaluation that it had been taken out of desperation, as a measure of last resort. During a household interview in Mymensingh, a village elder remarked that no one thought badly of the girl since everyone knew why she had left to go and work in garments. The economic difficulties of her family meant that she had little choice but to do so. Thus dire economic or other circumstances (such as a marriage that had failed due to the misdeeds of the man) served to push aside or at least downplay negative judgements about women’s migration and factory work. As I have noted in the discussion of the sending family household, attitudes towards women’s garment work were affected by the problem of dowry in the community, too. That is, there was recognition among community members of the rising costs and difficulties of marriage for girls. It was acknowledged that families with limited resources would have difficulty arranging the marriage of their girls. In these circumstances, sending the girl to the garment factory was justified — it was an acceptable if not desirable course of action. 170
Becoming a garment worker V. Conclusions 1. Poverty and the mobilization of women garment workers Among the different groups of women that the garment sector has mobilized are women from poor urban households. For these women, wage employment, whether it is brick-breaking or domestic service, is a necessity. The ability of the garment sector to recruit such women has stemmed from the relative attractions of garment work in comparison to the other types of unskilled employment available to women with low levels of education in urban areas. Besides women from poor urban households, the garment sector has also mobilized into its ranks women who would quite likely not be engaged in wage employment if jobs in garments were not available. For these women, garment work is a way to enhance personal and/or household economic resources. It is also a way to gain a measure of economic and social independence. Women from rural households constitute an important segment of the garment labour force. In many ways the mobilization of these women is the most striking, given that it involves not only a movement into the world of industrial wage work, but also into the urban environment. Single rural women who migrate to urban areas alone have traditionally been destitute and impoverished — from the lowest socioeconomic strata of rural society. With the development of the garment industry, however, we are now seeing the solo migration of rural woman from a more diverse array of socioeconomic backgrounds. While many of the rural migrant women in this study came from landless households, there were also those with some land holdings. More importantly, while economic scarcity was a general condition of the rural sending family household, a number of other “push” conditions and factors operated to provide the critical impetus for the move. In other words, economic scarcity alone does not provide a sufficient picture of how rural women become garment workers. Economic scarcity operates in conjunction with other “push” factors, such as family conflicts, marital breakdown, problems of harassment and uncertain marriage prospects. 2. Marriage dynamics and the mobilization of women garment workers The instability and uncertainty of marriage for women is an important dynamic underlying the mobilization of women into the 171
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Women’s Employment in the Textile
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This United Nations Research Instit
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Acknowledgements Many people have b
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notwithstanding the inertia of the
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Carol Miller is a policy analyst on
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xii VII. Contribution of different
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Introduction 1 Introduction 1 Shahr
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Introduction Table 1: Basic indicat
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Introduction women have been tradit
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Introduction The chapters on Bangla
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Introduction women workers related
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Introduction in low-income countrie
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Introduction participate in labour
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Introduction their bargaining power
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Introduction processing zones hypot
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Introduction IV. The case studies T
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Introduction experience in garment
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Introduction V. Conclusion Although
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Introduction improved technology. T
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Introduction References Afsar, R. (
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Introduction Household Power Relati
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Wage discrimination by gender in Mo
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