Neha Choudhary, ILO Kathmandu
National project coordinator,
ILO Integrated programme on Fair Recruitment (FAIR)
When I first met Ram Kumari Chaudhary, she was an extremely shy, but solemn, 19-year-old. She told me she wanted to go to work in Jordan to support her parents, adding that there were few opportunities to find a decent job in Nepal. Soon afterwards, in 2017, I learned that she had found a job in Jordan’s booming garment industry, earning, on average, around US$350 a month. Every three or four months she faithfully sent back about three-quarters of her salary to her parents in Nepal.
After about 18 months, her father’s poor health forced her to resign and return home. She brought with her a refund of her social security contributions worth about US$500, as well as some other savings. Her employer in Jordan also gave her a free airfare home as a welfare gesture. When we met again she had metamorphosed into a confident young lady, emboldened by her worldly experience and proud of her achievements. “I was able to make a support building a small home for my parents in the village,” she told me. “I have been supporting my father’s treatment. I brought back a flat screen TV when I came back. I have a modest saving if I want to do something. And, I have already been offered a job in a factory here. Given my international experience, the salary package is also good. Had I stayed in Nepal, I would not have earned that much.”
Chaudhary’s household is one of the 57 per cent in Nepal receiving remittances from migrant workers. So important are these financial flows to the Nepali economy that they are equivalent to 26 per cent of the country’s GDP. And, they are growing. In the financial year 2018/19 alone the country received migrants’ remittances of NPR 879.26 billion (US$ 7.76 billion), up from NPR 231.72 billion (US$ 2.05 billion) in the fiscal year 2009/10[1].
25-year-old Maya Chepang Praja, from Chitwan, south-west of the Nepali capital, Kathmandu, opted to work abroad to support the upbringing of her son, then aged three, after her husband abandoned them. Despite very little education, in Jordan she earned an average of USD275 per month – more than double the USD130 she was paid working at a factory in Nepal – and she was able to save most of this to send back to Nepal for her son.
Unfortunately, she was forced to return to Nepal after less than nine months of working in Jordan when her son, who was being cared for by his grandmother, had his leg crushed in an accident. “If the accident didn’t occur and if I had stayed back [in Jordan], I would have earned enough to give my son a good life, a good education. However, whatever I earned in the nine months helped me at least get his leg back. I will always be grateful for that,” she told me. She is now looking for another job abroad.
The importance of migration and remittances will continue to grow in Nepal, because approximately 500,000 individuals are entering the labour market annually but only one in 10 are finding jobs. In these circumstances, it seems close to impossible to lead a quality life, with access to health, education and decent housing, without going for foreign employment. Furthermore, as these young women’s stories show, opportunities to work overseas in decent jobs have also made an important contribution to the empowerment of Nepali women in a broader sense of the term. This is seldom taken into consideration in larger studies on the socio-political impact of remittances and foreign employment.
[1] Figures from Nepal Rastra Bank, 2019
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When you’re up against a challenge as big as improving conditions for workers in Haiti’s garment sector, it’s easy to lose sight of the progress being made and focus on the problems. Risks to health and safety are still among the biggest. More than three in four factories in Haiti don’t meet the requirements for emergency preparedness.
I work as an Enterprise Advisor for Better Work Haiti. It’s my job to assess factories and help workers and employers to solve problems and improve working conditions. When we first started operations in 2009, the words “Occupational Safety and Health” weren’t in the vocabulary here. When talking to workers and managers about the basics of how to keep safe, we were often starting from scratch.
The ILO celebrates the World Day for Safety and Health at Work on the 28 April to promote the prevention of occupational accidents and diseases globally. Find out moreYet, workers know about their own working conditions better than anyone else. My team recognized from the earliest stages that if we wanted to make a lasting impact, we had to get them involved. So we started by setting up worker-management health and safety committees. Their goal was to assess conditions at their factories, tackle health and safety issues and train workers on how to stay safe.
Just three years ago, not a single factory in Haiti had a health and safety committee. Today, they’ve been set up at 23 different factories, which together produce all of Haiti’s garment exports to the United States.
One of the biggest challenges we face is creating trust between the management and workers. That means breaking down barriers and establishing open lines of communication. On average, it takes a full year to get a health and safety committee set up. Commitment from the management to allow input from workers is a vital part of the process.
But after three years, the hard work of managements, government, unions and buyers is starting to pay off. More and more, health and safety committees are taking charge of precautions that protect workers from injury every day. Ensuring they have needle guards to protect their hands and fingers and know not to stack boxes in front of fire extinguishers are just a few examples. In fact, when a phone cable sparked a small factory fire recently, the workers responded immediately, using a fire extinguisher to put it out before anyone was injured.
Better Work is a partnership between ILO and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Find out more about Better Work Haiti
Of course, making factories better places to work can come at a price. For example, energy costs are high in Haiti and keeping a factory cool during the summer is expensive. And there’s still much more work to be done. Factories need better systems for recording accidents and we need to further raise awareness about the importance of wearing protective gear. Heat and noise levels will have to be addressed.
But on the whole, we’re on the right track. We want to get to the stage where workers are so informed and empowered to act on safety issues that they can tackle problems as they arise. We want them to tell mechanics, “don’t take off that needle guard” or tell their supervisor, “look, that wire isn’t safe.”
We’re not there yet, but that’s where we’re headed.
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