54% garment workers paid through MFS in Feb: Sanem

Around 54 per cent of the garment workers in Bangladesh were paid through mobile financial services in February and the rest through cash, a research finds.

For their work in December, female workers got an average salary of Tk 12,000 while it was Tk 12,500 for male workers, it said.

For January, the amount remained unchanged at Tk 12,000 for female workers but their male counterparts saw a rise by Tk 500 on an average in their salaries, it read.

The South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (Sanem) in collaboration with USA-based non-profit organisation Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) prepared the report depending on data collected in January and February.

The Sanem and MFO have been collecting data from 1,300 garment workers every week since April 2020 as part of a research titled "Garment Worker Diaries" to understand their living standards.

These workers are employed in factories spread across five main industrial areas of Bangladesh: Chittagong, Dhaka City, Gazipur, Narayanganj, and Savar.

Three quarters of the survey respondents are women, which roughly represents the composition of labour force in the RMG sector as a whole.

About 20 percent of the garment workers reported that at least one member of their household was ill during February. This illness rate was 26 per cent in January.