DHAKA: Bangladesh garment factory owner Shahidullah Azim laid off 20% of his workers in the wake of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Now watching the second wave build in Europe and the United States, Azim is staring at “an unprecedented crisis.”
He’s not alone. Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest apparel producer after China, but its industry leaders say international retailers are either refraining from placing orders, delaying buying decisions or demanding steep price cuts.
“This is a disaster. We are taking orders just to survive,” said Siddiqur Rahman, a garment supplier to international retailers including H&M and GAP Inc.
“We anticipated orders could look up before the Christmas but that didn’t happen.”
Rahman said customers were demanding price cuts of as much as 15%, making the recovery that much harder.
In the financial year that ended in June, Bangladesh’s garment exports totaled $27.94 billion, down 18% from the previous year.
There was a rebound of less than 1% in the July-September quarter, thanks to a surge in demand for knitwear items, which account for half of Bangladesh’s total garment exports.
But nearly half of factories producing knitwear products like t-shirts and sweaters are finding it difficult to remain open, said Selim Osman, president of the Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association.
“A second wave could further delay the recovery,” Osman said.
Low wages have helped Bangladesh build its garment industry, with some 4,000 factories employing 4 million workers. Readymade garments are a mainstay of the economy, contributing almost 16% of country’s GDP, according to the central bank.
Factory owner Azim, who supplies European and North American retailers, says he has been forced to cut one-in-five jobs.
“That’s the case for most of the factories,” he said. “Now the second wave has started. We don’t know what future holds for us.”
Experts fear the South Asian country might itself face another surge in infections during the winter, having so far confirmed 390,206 cases, including 5,681 deaths.
About a third of the one million workers who were either furloughed or laid off have been rehired since July, according to union leaders.
But many workers are struggling without overtime pay, which often accounts for 20% of their monthly income.
“Without overtime, it is too difficult to meet expenses,” said Banesa Begum, a worker in Gazipur, on the outskirt of the capital city Dhaka.
“I just pray that my factory gets more orders so that we can survive.”
Bangladesh garment workers pray for orders as pandemic shreds exports
https://arab.news/p4uz7
Bangladesh garment workers pray for orders as pandemic shreds exports
- A garment supplier said customers were demanding price cuts of as much as 15%
- In the financial year that ended in June Bangladesh’s garment exports totaled $27.94 billion
Poland slow to counter Russia’s ‘existential threat’: general
- The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernization,” compared to increases in the army’s size
- Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039
WARSAW: Russia poses an “existential threat” to Poland and its military is lagging, the country’s armed forces chief warned senior officials on Wednesday.
Poland, the largest country on NATO’s eastern flank and a neighbor of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, is the western alliance’s largest spender in relative terms.
This year, the country is allocating 4.8 percent of its GDP to defense, just shy of the alliance’s five percent target to be met by 2035.
However, that record defense spending was not enough to “make up for nearly three decades of chronic underfunding of the armed forces,” General Wieslaw Kukula, chief of the general staff, argued at the meeting, which included top officers, the defense minister and Poland’s president.
The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernization,” compared to increases in the army’s size.
Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039, compared with around 210,000 at present.
As a result of a lack of updates, some new Polish units “are not achieving combat readiness,” due to insufficient equipment, rather than a personnel shortage, the general argued.
Meanwhile, he added, “the Russian Federation remains an existential threat to Poland.”
Russia “is constantly reorganizing its forces, drawing on the lessons from its aggression in Ukraine, and building up the capacity for a conventional conflict with NATO countries,” he stressed.
Poland is to receive 43.7 billion euros ($51,5 billion) in loans under the European Union’s Security Action For Europe (SAFE) scheme, designed to strengthen Europe’s defensive capabilities.
Warsaw plans to use these funds to boost domestic arms production.
The Polish government claims that Poland will be able to access SAFE finance even if President Karol Nawrocki — backed by Poland’s conservative-nationalist opposition — vetos a law setting out domestic arrangements for its implementation.
Law and Justice (PiS) — the main opposition party — argues that SAFE could become a new tool for Brussels to place undue pressure on Poland, thanks to a planned mechanism for monitoring the funds, which they claim risks undermining Polish sovereignty.
