Womens Apparel: For Them Safety Is All About More Than Putting In A Fire Escape It’s About Being Heard
admin 
In the course of the holiday shopping season, women’s opinions matter.
a really new report, Our Voices, Our Safety, published this week by my organization, the International Labor Rights Forum, describes how women garment workers in Bangladesh -who account for 80percent of the apparel industry workforce there -are unable to speak up anyway or make their voices heard when they feel unsafe or unfairly treated.
While killing 1,For them, safety is mostly about more than putting in a fire escape, it’s about being heard, so it is a poser for apparel workers, the majority of whom know all and beaten, often brutally, outside of work or in their communities by thugs hired by their employers.
Hundreds of them, however, said their ongoing fears stem from an inability to communicate productively with management. We have to save our stomach. Therefore this intimidation is after that, compounded by workers’ desperate need to keep their jobs. Women workers especially described detailed examples of how they are surrounded by a web of violence that silences them in their communities, their homes and at work. Besides, one woman said. We can’t secure workers’ rights in the industry as long as the majority female workforce continues to be silenced by the violence in their lives. While starting with the industries where women make up such dozens of the workforce, we can’t change the status of women in society if we don’t address the repression of their voice at work. Anyway, we need policy makers and apparel brand executives to fully ‘hear’ the voices of these workers, plenty of them women, and to support programs that protect workers’ rights to safe and decent work and to organize and bargain collectively -to sit at the table as equal human beings with management and negotiate solutions for the industry as partners.
