Ajit Kumar Sarkar
Reskilling of the country’s garment workers has become inevitable as automation in five areas -- sewing, warehousing, gluing, knitting and finishing -- may cause huge job loss and reduce labour time up to 70 percent, says the report of a government study.
The study titled ‘Education and Skills for Leveraging Fourth Industrial Revolution’ was conducted by Leveraging ICT for Growth, Employment and Governance (LICT) Project of BCC under ICT Division in collaboration with Centre for Project Management Institute (PMIS) of Dhaka University.
“The study was conducted to know the impact of the introduction of advance technologies and automation of industries [on stakeholders],” said ICT Secretary N M Zeaul Alam. The study report was released in December last year. Zeaul Alam said the industries including RMG should take immediate step to reskill their workers through providing time-befitting training to adapt to the automation.
According to the study report, the employment in the readymade garments (RMG) sector has come down to 4 million in 2018 from 4.4 million in 2016 due to introduction emerging technologies in the industry. Female workers are proportionately less knowledgeable about operating different machines compared with their male counterparts, the report observes and suggests reskilling of the workers and placing them in new types of jobs.
The automation of manufacturing reduced the female workers’ participation ratio in the garment sector to 60.8 percent in 2016 from 64 percent in 2015, it says referring to another study. The study also found that 47.37 percent of large enterprises and 25 percent medium enterprises used advanced technologies.
The automation in the five areas will eventually be cheaper alternative to labour replacing least costly industrial labour in Bangladesh, the report observes. It mentions that export has reached $30.61 billion in 2018 against $28.67 billion in 2016. Despite the growth of export volume by around 10 percent per year, there has been no job growth in the sector over last four years, it adds. An ILO study finds that by 2041, 60 percent of workers will lose jobs in Bangladesh’s apparel sector.
