Freedom of Association in Practice. A comparison between factory-based trade unions and worker participation committees in apparel factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Summary
Due to imbalanced power relations in the global apparel value chain, factory workers often suffer from extremely bad working conditions. In apparel factories in Bangladesh are, especially freedom of association rights an issue, as workers are not able to organize properly, to voice their concerns in order to improve working conditions. The Bangladeshi government introduce worker participation committees improve worker voice. However, these committees are now, substituting factory-based trade unions, which could have serious impacts on the empowerment of worker voice. Therefore, this research comapred the functioning of both unions and committees in order to evaluate if committees can substitute factory unions. Results show that this is not possible, mainly due to the differences in negotiation power and the independence of management control. Reasons behind the weaknesses of both committees and unions were found to be: poor law enforcement, cultural barriers, the complexity of the apparel value chain and the imbalanced power relations in the value chain.