Women's Employment - United Nations Research Institute for Social ...

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.
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