Rags, Riches and Women Workers: Export-oriented Garment Manufacturing in Bangladesh

This chapter is concerned with women working in the export-oriented readymade garment industry in Bangladesh. Although the majority of these women are located in what is officially classified as ‘the formal economy’, the nature of their contracts and their terms and conditions are more typical of work in the informal economy. Their situation illustrates the point made by a number of authors that the relationship between the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economy in much of the world, particularly the developing world, is a continuum rather than a dichotomy. What was traditionally described as ‘formal sector’ employment, characterized by written contracts, full-time work, permanent status and various forms of social benefits, accounts for an increasingly smaller share of total employment, while employment characterized by differing degrees of informality accounts for an increasing share (ILO, 2002; Lund and Srinivas, 2000; Standing, 1999). Clothing is a highly labour-intensive, low-technology product, the manufacture of which, along with textiles, has provided many countries of the world, including today’s advanced industrialized economies, with the first rung on their ladder to industrialization. While there has been diffusion of microelectronic equipment in the pre-assembly stages of grading, marking and cutting, the limpness of materials used in clothing has made mechanization in the labour-intensive assembly stage extremely difficult and, as long as there are plentiful supplies of cheap labour available, uneconomical. The global restructuring of the garment industry in recent decades is in part