Bottom up: how workers see it

Because of the fact that wages are so low and the cost of living so high, she finds it very hard to make ends meet. At 18, she is the only earning member of her family of three. She is an only child and both her parents are jobless. She spends almost 40% of her income on the rent of her one bedroom house. When told that companies check that workers should get at least the minimum wage set by the government, which they all do, she said that “if they think this wage is enough they should all try to live on this amount for a month and decide if it is OK.” - interview with a Pakistani worker

In many countries those who can get jobs in factories considered lucky, and young girls leave their families in rural areas to travel hundreds of miles in search of them.  Yet the reality when they arrive is tough.

We work until 2 am or 3 am during the peak season. We always have to work a double shift. Although we are very exhausted, we have no choice. We cannot refuse overtime work, because our standard wages are so low.- Thai worker

These are not the extreme examples: this is the norm. The pay that an average worker in the garment industry takes home is often well below the national poverty line, itself short of what can be reasonably defined as a living wage.

Minimum wages, usually defined by governments, are set in the context of ferocious competition between countries for clothing trade and consequently and often fall well below these governments' own poverty thresholds.  Worse still, the responses from companies to our survey indicate that many suppliers do not even pay this legal minimum. set by governments, are often set at levels well below living wage levels.

An additional problem exists for the millions of piece-rate workers and homeworkers in the global garment industry.  Paid by the number of garments they produce, not the number of hours they work, the rate per piece often makes it impossible to earn a living wage in a normal working week, but when the issue is raised, managers will simply argue that they should work faster.  Employed informally and further removed from the brands, they are more vulnerable to seasonal variations in work.

It's not just garment workers themselves who suffer, but their families too.  Young people who have traveled from the country often need to send back money to unemployed or poor parents before they can look after themselves in the city. The garment workforce is 80% female, and those who are not looking after their parents often have children to support.