5. Up-skilling and masculinizing labour

When we returned to the RMG factories for new research in late 2019, RMG owners and unionists estimated that the share of men in the workforce had almost doubled since 2015, growing from roughly 20 percent to at least 40 percent. Studies by the International Labor Organization and the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies conclude that the gender ratio is 50:50.[1] One reason for the widespread ‘masculinization’ of the RMG workforce are the wage hikes in the RMG industry since 2013, which make it more attractive for men to work there. There is of course a bitter irony in this, because it was largely women workers who had fought for these hikes in earlier strikes.

[1] https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/Women-workforce-declining-in-RMG-sector. [accessed: 15.03.2021].

There were further technological changes occurring in the industry that provoke the changing social profile of its workforces. In the sewing factories we visited, sewing machines were still almost exclusively operated by women, but the number of helpers who worked in equal numbers as sewers and who had also been women has been drastically cut. In many sweater factories, new computerized jacquard machines require few workers for operating them and they are all men. Furthermore, many knitwear manufacturers added expensive, technologically sophisticated spinning, dyeing and washing sections to their factories during the last decade to produce their own fabric, and also here workers are almost exclusively men. These few examples show the strong gender effects of technological changes in the RMG industry.

The new, male workers had completed school and vocational training or even an engineering diploma, which suggests that they do not classify as the urban or rural poor. This is in line with their self-portrayals in the social media in which they emphasize their education, self-discipline, job commitment, and their special skills needed to operate high-end machines, documented, for example, with selfies in front of them. They identify not only as an aspiring middle class (moddhobitto sreni) but also call themselves jacquard-er shoinik, that is, ‘the jacquard’s soldiers’ or ‘soldiers of the jacquard machine’. It is not far-fetched to assume that their efforts at masculinizing work in the garment sector are intended to counter the widespread assumptions and depiction of the feminine nature of the workforce.