Estimating a Minimum Living Wage for the Ready Made Garment Sector in Bangladesh 2013 (Free pdf download)

Living minimum wages is now a buzz word in the ready-made garment sector, especially in Bangladesh. Big apparel brands (H&M) and buyers want suppliers to implement fair living wages for garment industry workers. In this scenario, many garment business owners and researchers would be interested to know exactly,
  • what is the correct definition of minimum living wages
  • how to estimate living minimum wages for ready-made garment industry workers. 
A couple of days ago, I have found a book named as the above title, authored by a team of researchers. I hope you will find this book very helpful to understand the definition of various terms related to minimum wages, living wages, and statistics related to minimum wages for Bangladesh as well as other Asian countries.

What are Minimum Wages? 

Authors of this book have defined Minimum wages as a wage that is sufficient to meet the basic needs of workers and their families and provide some discretionary income. Conceptually basic needs mean “more than the necessities of life: food, clothing and shelter”. Additional elements used in the definition of basic needs are clean water, healthcare, childcare, transportation, education, energy, and some discretionary income or savings.

In other words: basic needs are not simply the nutritional and non-nutritional requirements at ‘poverty level’; rather it means requirements higher than that level. Different nutritional requirements of men, women, and children in the family need to be taken into account while estimating the minimum wage for workers. A major part of basic needs are related with non-food needs as listed above.

To download the book (pdf format), click on the following book cover page.



Before downloading the book you can check content page of the book.



I like to thank the authors and research team to write this book for us.

Research team:

  1. Dr. K.G. Moazzem —Additional Research Director, Centre for Policy Dialogue, Bangladesh
  2. Saifa Raz — Research Associate, Centre for Policy Dialogue, Bangladesh
  3. Doug Miller — Emeritus Professor Worker Rights in Fashion, Northumbria University, United Kingdom
  4. Claudia Schlangen — Consultant, Berenschot, Netherlands
  5. Irina van der Sluijs — Senior Consultant, Berenschot, Netherlands
If you find this information helpful, please share this information with your friends.

Prasanta Sarkar

Prasanta Sarkar is a textile engineer and a postgraduate in fashion technology from NIFT, New Delhi, India. He has authored 6 books in the field of garment manufacturing technology, garment business setup, and industrial engineering. He loves writing how-to guide articles in the fashion industry niche. He has been working in the apparel manufacturing industry since 2006. He has visited garment factories in many countries and implemented process improvement projects in numerous garment units in different continents including Asia, Europe, and South Africa. He is the founder and editor of the Online Clothing Study Blog.

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