FESTIVAL ALLOWANCE RMG workers deprive of legitimate amount

More than a half of apparel factories of the country were not giving legitimate amount in festival allowance to their workers, taking advantage of the labour law.
Labour leaders said that as per the convention, workers were entitled to festival allowance equivalent to monthly basic pay, but most of the apparel workers were getting lower than their basic pay as the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 did not fix the amount.
According to the Labour Rules, workers, working for two years at any factory or establishment, would be entitled to two festival allowances in a year and the amount of the allowance would not be higher than monthly basic pay.
‘The Labour Rules empowers readymade garment factory owners to pay any amount as per their will in festival allowance and many of them pay much lower than the monthly basic pay,’ Bangladesh Garment Workers-Employees League president Md Sirajul Islam Roni told New Age on Thursday.
He said that more than half of the apparel workers were usually given 50-80 per cent of their basic pay in festival allowance.
Sirajul, however, said that about 90 per cent of factories paid festival allowances until Thursday and a few of them paid the allowance higher than the basic pay.
The Bangladesh Labour Act and the Labour Rules specified no amount of festival allowance for apparel workers but it become a convention that owners would pay the monthly basic pay as festival allowance, said Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies executive director Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmed.
‘I thanked the government for making the provision of festival allowance in the Labour Rules, but the provision has empowered owners to deprive workers of legitimate festival allowance,’ he said.
The rules should have set the basic pay as the lowest amount of festival allowance for the workers while the government strangely stipulated that the amount of the festival allowance would not be higher than basic pay, he said.
‘Such stipulation in the labour rules is hurting instead of protecting the interest of workers,’ Sultan said. 
Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association senior vice-president Faruque Hassan said that it would not be logical if any factory owner paid festival allowance lower than the basic pay.
He claimed that most of the factories paid festival allowance equivalent to the monthly basic pay and some of the large-scale factories paid the allowance equivalent to the gross wage of a month.
Faruque said that workers were now very much conscious about their rights and factory owners would need to ensure the basic pay of a month in festival allowance in coming days. 

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net