3. The first RMG labour forces

In 1978, Desh Garments e.g., Bangladesh’s first entirely export-oriented RMG producer, sent workers for training to South Korea. Back in Bangladesh, the latter trained other workers on the job. These skilled workers were highly sought after, and they often joined other local companies without direct foreign investment. Most of the trainees were men.[1] In fact, as the photos from one of the first ready-made garment exporters reproduced below reveal, most sewing operators in the local garment industry so far had been men.

[1] When Desh Garments, one of the first Bangladeshi companies in the export business, sent the first 130 trainees to South Korea in 1978, only 18 among them were women.

When the RMG industry really took off in Bangladesh in the mid-1980s, men continued to work in managerial, in supervisory and in high-skilled positions (the cutting and finishing sections, or mechanics fixing machines). However, especially in sewing operations it started to draw primarily on young women workers from the countryside that were pushed to urban labour markets in Dhaka and Chottogram by an agrarian crisis that increased the share of landless households in the overall population between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s from one-third to almost fifty per cent.[2] In the eyes of garment factory owners and the urban elite to whom they belonged, these women workers were innately ‘nimble fingered’, docile sojourners who would work a few years in urban factories, but would eventually return to their villages and marry. Since sewing was the most labor-intensive part of the ‘cutting-trimming-making’ undertaken in Bangladesh’s RMG industry women began to starkly outnumber men from the mid-1980s onwards, and made up roughly 80 percent of the overall workforce.

[2] Markus Maurer, Skill Formation Regimes in South Asia: A Comparative Study on the Path-Dependent Development of Technical and Vocational Education and Training for the Garment Industry, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 2011, 298.