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Trade unions, gender issues and the ready-made garment industry of Bangladesh interests rather than pursuing the interests of the female garment workers and their unit unions. Some garment factory owners have labelled some federation leaders as “trade unionist brokers” who “milk” both sides — the RMG workers and/or their unit unions and the owners — in the name of solving industrial disputes. According to them, in times of industrial conflicts, some of these federation leaders take money from the owners to “buy off” the prospective male troublemakers among the garment workers (interestingly, most of the owners have confessed to the author that it is much easier to bribe a male leader than a female one). At the same time, they also try to squeeze money from mostly female workers by promising them protection from harassment from members of the law enforcing agencies or the hired musclemen of the owner. Although some of our respondent federations reported that they try to educate female garment workers and their unit union leaders regarding their legal rights and obligations through various workshops, group discussions and other means, during our survey we observed only non-registered Federation G to be conducting weekly classes on various legal, social, and other issues related to female workers. The leaders of this federation, however, confessed that they often encountered difficulties in getting enough female garment workers to participate in the courses. k. Formation of the unit unions Unit unions in the RMG sector in Bangladesh are formed in two ways. One, the federations try to form unions in as many factory units as they can, so that, as umbrella bodies of various unit unions, they can emerge as legitimate bargaining agents in this specific area of the private sector. In this process, the federation leaders themselves organize the workers in various units, secretly obtaining the signatures of 30 per cent of workers interested in joining unit unions and doing all the necessary legwork (including, they claim, bribing the officials at the office of the Registrar of Trade Unions). Unit unions can also be formed subsequent to the involvement of federations in non-unionized labour disputes: for instance, when workers of a factory face problems such as delay in payment of wages and overtime benefits, scrapping of holidays, or deterioration of the factory environment, they come to the federations for assistance. The federations then provide various kinds of assistance, such as organizing demonstrations and moving the matter to relevant labour courts and so on. Thereafter, they slowly explore the possibility of forming unit unions in the factory, and then 197
Women’s employment in the textile manufacturing sectors of Bangladesh and Morocco try to persuade workers to join by explaining how easy it would be for them to handle industrial disputes if they had their unions there. When the workers become interested, they explain to them the required procedures for obtaining registration, and if necessary, provide them legal, institutional and other support. Two of our respondent federations reported forming unit unions through federation initiatives only, while seven reported that unit unions were joint initiatives of both the federation and unit levels. Theoretically speaking, of course, the workers of any factory can form their unit unions independently if they can muster support from 30 per cent of the workers of that factory and get their signatures on the “Form D” before submitting it to the office of the Registrar of Trade Unions. The Registrar, on being satisfied that the signatories have complied with all the requirements of the Industrial Relations Ordinance of 1969 for being registered as a trade union, is supposed to register the trade union in a prescribed register and issue a registration certificate in the prescribed form within a period of 60 days from the date of receipt of the application. However, as can be seen from our survey, this procedure has rarely taken place in Bangladesh, first because very few of the garment workers, most of whom are females and rural migrants, are aware of the procedures regarding the formation of trade unions. Second, even if they know the procedure, they are worried about possible harassment from the management. Nevertheless, the author can attest that some workers did try in certain factories to form independent trade unions. But after some time, they were forced to seek the assistance of different federations for various reasons, including the bureaucratic hassles involved in unionization. It is, therefore, no wonder that five of our seven respondent federations were formed through the joint initiatives of both the general unit level workers and federations. In the second part of this section we will venture to elaborate different issues related to unit level unions. 2. Review of the unit level unions a. The respondent unit unions of our survey As was mentioned in section I, we tried to interview as many female unit union leaders as could be made available to us by the federations. Since all but one of our respondent federations claimed to have more than seven unit unions in Dhaka, we at first decided to interview at least seven unit unions from each federation. However, we were able to interview the office bearers of only 28 unit unions. 198
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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 occurs, on average, at
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Introduction women workers related
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Introduction in low-income countrie
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Introduction by repaying their “d
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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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Gender and employment in Moroccan t
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Gender dimensions of labour migrati
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Table 1: Total number of male and f
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258 Women’s employment in the tex
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