Eleven global retailers including Walmart, Gap Inc and H&M are urging the Bangladeshi prime minister to take swift action over low wages for garment workers which they fear could taint their reputations as socially responsible companies.
The retailers want the government to "form a review board and address the minimum wage issue in the garment sector with the built-in mechanism of a yearly review," the Financial Express newspaper said.
In a letter sent by the firms including Carrefour, Tesco and Levi Strauss, they said worker strikes and protests over low wages are "seen as a risk among our companies and could cause damage to the reputation of Bangladesh as a reliable sourcing market."
"All signatories to this letter are socially responsible companies expecting that workers producing our products are properly compensated by their employers," the letter said.
The Bangladeshi apparel industry, which employs more than two million workers and has around 4,500 factories, is regularly disrupted by strikes and protests over low wages and poor working conditions which have led to widespread factory closures.
The basic government-set minimum monthly wage of a garment worker is around 25 dollars but a family of four spends around half of this on food. Clothing factories are also thought to have cut wages by 20 to 30 per cent in a bid to compete for orders with countries such as Vietnam, China and India. |
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