by JESMIN PAPRI
Facing competition from Vietnam and Cambodia, factories are using automation and surveillance to ramp up production and cut labor costs.
- Automation in Dhaka’s garment factories is leading to job cuts, especially for women.
- Smart surveillance devices monitor workers as factories struggle to compete globally.
- Brands are “pleased” by smart factories that produce efficiently and quickly.
The young woman quickly sewed a piece of gray fabric and handed it down the manufacturing line at one of Dhaka’s largest garment factories. She looked impatiently at the woman before her, as if willing her to work faster and pass on the next piece.
Atop her sewing machine, a screen glowed a red warning. She had made only seven pieces so far, it showed. Her target for the day was 101. As she progressed, the screen’s color would change to orange, and then, if she hit the target, green. If she remained consistently behind, she would be fired.
The tablet-sized screen is part of an internet-connected device called “Nidle,” short for “No idle.” Its sensors track how many pieces the woman sews in an hour, and how many minutes she is idle.
Nidle is among the newly adopted devices in Bangladesh’s top garment factories that fall in the category of “smart manufacturing.” These include fully robotic devices and partially automated machines that require some human guidance. The factories supply brands such as H&M and Zara, which rely on bringing mass-manufactured garments to retail quickly, before a trend dies out.
Having computerized machines drive human labor is meant to solve a critical problem facing Bangladesh’s garment sector: rising wages in a nation whose competitive edge historically has been its cheap workforce.
“Increasingly, workers are getting scarce in a country like Bangladesh, where per capita income is increasing. So workers are demanding more,” Khondaker Golam Moazzem, research director at the Centre for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka, told Rest of World. “There is a tendency, at least to some extent, to use machines to replace workers.”
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