Dealing with a lakh of productive workers
The garment industry in Bangladesh suffers from a shortage of skilled workers/supervisors/managers, reports The Daily Star (”Journalism without fear or favour”):
Dr Nazrul Islam, principal, BIFT, said the shortage is of two types; one is the shortage of skilled workers. The other is the shortage of mid-level managers like skilled machine operators, quality controllers, merchandisers and production managers.
The readymade garment sector of Bangladesh earns around $8 billion foreign currency per year, but the productivity of the 22 lakh workers is much lower than in Sri Lanka and China.
The reasons are lack of skill, poor management, poor working environment, poor health, low motivation and job satisfaction.
There is no study in Bangladesh on job ethics and the reasons behind the lack of motivation and job satisfaction of the garment workers, he said. But poor salary might be one of the reasons, he added.
Lakh is my favorite foreign word. One lakh is equal to 100,000.
Dr. Islam goes on to make the kind of observation that has somehow become almost obsolete in America:
“Many owners are hiring managers from countries like Sri Lanka, India, Korea and China. But the lifeline of our economy cannot depend on foreign recruits. It is not safe also because there can be a conflict of interest when a Bangladeshi company with an Indian manager and an Indian company vie for the same customer,” he said.
Many years ago I attended a seminar arranged by enterprising business students at my college in Sweden. The seminar focused on the importance of understanding cultural differences when doing business abroad, a useful topic since many Swedish business students aim for employment with one of Sweden’s multinational companies (Ericsson, Ikea, SKF, Electrolux etc). One of the presenters was a grizzled gentleman with extensive experience in south Asia. He cautioned the attending students that one has to be careful when hiring in countries like India, where employees were often more loyal to relatives than to the employer. Shocked gasps could be heard from the audience. I probably gasped myself. Betray one’s employer for the sake of enriching one’s relatives? Outrageous.
Sweden is a pretty odd country.
