Print friendly
Meet the woman who makes Walmart’s low-priced clothes.
She works 10-hour days for $103 per month. And her factory is one of the good ones.
Amid the bustle of the factory floor, Nahar Akhter’s fingers move ceaselessly across the metal throat plate of her sewing machine, dragging seam after seam to completion.
It is quietly furious work, driven by the pressure of a daily quota, but for a young garment worker with a sick mother and a 5-year-old at home, it provides the daily bread.
“My husband and I spend money for my mother’s medical treatment, provide for my son, and save a bit,” Akhter says.
It is work many in Bangladesh would like to have.
Crowding more than 158 million people into a country smaller in area than Iowa, Bangladesh is a nation beset by poverty, limited infrastructure, and corruption.
An estimated 40 percent of the country’s residents live below the poverty line, driving millions each year from the lowland deltas of the interior to the crowded cities of Dhaka and Chittagong in search of work.
There, many end up on the production floors of the estimated 5,000 garment factories that form the backbone of the country’s economy.
It is a path familiar to Akhter, who followed her two older sisters into the Mark Mode Limited garment factory in the Gazipur District of Dhaka.
Having lost her father when she was just an infant, Akhter, like many girls here, was forced to choose marriage and work over education.
Married at 13 and pregnant at 14, garment work was an option that promised a living wage for a young woman with few choices.
“I didn’t want to stop my studies, but my father died when I was one year old, so there was no one to support our education,” Akhter says.
Six days per week Akhter works from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. with a one-hour lunch break. Continue reading
Sources
- U.S. Catholic
- Image: anticap
Related Posts:
News category: Features.
