Discrimination Goes on
<i>Work equal, wage half for women labourers</i>
Women labourers at work at Teesta Bridge construction site in Lalmonirhat. Like elsewhere, they are still victim of serious wage discrimination.Photo: STAR
Women labourers in the district are facing wage discrimination despite daylong hard toil, even sometimes the wage is only one-third than their male fellow workers. Mostly belonging to poor families, the women workers are engaged in croplands, brickfields, hotels and restaurants, houses, small industrial units, garments factories, bidi factories, construction sites and other places. Taking the advantage of their ignorance and poverty, local middlemen hire them in exchange for low wage to work in crop fields or other places. While talking recently with some women labourers working at Teesta Bridge construction site at Teesta village under Sadar upazila, it was found that everyone of them was hired at Tk 100 to 110 per day, while a male labourer was given Tk 250 to 300 per day. Although the demand for women labourers has considerably increased for their sincerity in work compared to the male ones, they are being exploited by their employers because of their simplicity, sources said. Many of the women are working to back their families by supplementing the meagre income of their father or husband. Despite backbreaking work, these female labourers are cheated in wage by their employers across the district. On the other hand, the male labourers, often being less active in work, are paid higher and treated better than the female ones, several women labourers alleged. Salma Begum, 40, a divorcee at Tajpur village in Sadar upazila, said, "I am working at Teesta Bridge construction site for Tk 100 to Tk 110 a day which is too insufficient to maintain my family." "Nevertheless, I am forced to work here, as there is no scope to work at other places," she went on, adding that they were well aware of cheating by the middlemen but had no way to fight against them because of lack of unity among the women labourers. Hazera Banu, 32, a deserted woman, said, "Sometimes I work at mills, sometimes in crop fields and other places. But nobody (middlemen) offers me the wage equal to the male workers although I do the same job". However, Sohrab Ali, a middleman at Chaparhat under Kaliganj upazila, admitting that the women labourers were more active, said they had to remain satisfied with low wage as they never protested discrimination. He said that the women labourers would get 'official' wage if mills and factories were set up in the region. Mili Begum, executive director of Jago Nari Kalyan Sangstha, an NGO in Lalmonirhat, said her organisation was working to make awareness among women labourers in the district. “We are trying to unite the deprived women labourers against the middlemen in different areas of five upazilas,” she said.
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