The Rs. 21 million social awareness campaign—Abhimani: Pride of the Nation—launched recently to uplift the image of the women workers of the apparel industry will not be successful unless the industry improves conditions for these women a unionist said. "The apparel industry is facing a labour shortage of about 30,000 workers and I don’t think a media campaign can do much to attract workers," said Anton Marcus, President, FTZ and General Services Workers Union. "If adequate wages were paid there would not be a need for TV commercials to say that the industry was the best place to work in, "Living conditions in the FTZ are pathetic and nothing has really been done by the industry to improve them, so how do they expect to attract young women into the industry, "A recent study by the Labour Department showed that 55 percent of married women in the FTZs suffer from anaemia while 44 percent of the unmarried women suffer from this disease because they cannot afford healthy meals, "The industry says that ethical working conditions are maintained at the garment factories but we know that buyers often outsource their audits and the factories are notified in advance so that a thorough cleanup can be done and a select group of workers groomed to answer any questions posed by the auditors." This makes sense because remunerations and working conditions attract labour. For an industry to see the need to advertise the fact that a job in the industry will indeed improve lives, goes to show that it has not proved to be the case. The Rs. 21 million social awareness campaign is commendable. But something is not right when an industry, who has always maintained that the sub-human living conditions of the FTZs was the government’s responsibility and not theirs as they were running a business, to come up with a quarter of the investment to uplift the image of these women does beg answer to the earlier raised question. There is no doubt that many factories do maintain ethical working conditions and have indeed improved the lives of the women working in them and that of their communities, but they seem to be the exceptions. Sri Lanka is losing its competitiveness because production costs are soaring and the industry has a legitimate reason for not conceding labour union demands for wage increments. And despite marginal returns some factories do provide their workers with free meals and even transport. The industry feels that the success stories are not told. But they cannot be told or even advertised. If the people are happy in the industry there will always be demand for jobs. These women are indeed the pride of our nation. The industry needs the social activists and unions to regulate it. "Out of the 400 odd garment factories in the country today only four of them have signed collective agreements with labour unions. So how can the industry say that they have ethical working conditions when the workers themselves don’t have the right to form associations and have a greater say in the way their organisations are run?" Marcus concluded. |
