Small owners try harder
K Mowla Chowdhury
K Mowla Chowdhury, managing director of Niponika Garments Ltd, pores over his workers' salary sheet in his cramped office at the city's Badda area, with piles up of documents all around.
A good number of shirt samples hang in racks inside his small office. He cannot afford a separate display room and the huge piles of documents also say how small his office is.
Every few minutes the white haired managing director, 55, must instruct the mid-level officers or deal with international buyers arriving without appointment. His factory and the administrative offices are at the sixth floor of the sprawling building.
He is adjusting the new pay scale to be implemented from November 1. But he says he can afford to pay his 420 shop-floor workers this amount. In fact, he says he could afford to pay some of the increase before November.
"I think the proposed salary of Tk 3,000 at the entry level is justified," he says. "But implementation of the new pay structure could be much earlier under a staggered payment system."
Chowdhury has already been quoting higher prices to buyers. "I have already started contacting the buyers to increase the prices of the garment items, so I can adjust the hike with my income."
Some buyers were agreeable, he says but some are yet to respond. "Anyways, I have to pay the workers in time as per the new pay structure formulated by the government. How small my factory is does not matter."
Niponika is not a big factory in the RMG sector. It mainly produces woven shirts for Li and Fung and YM Canada. He says the latest labour unrest was an avoidable communication gap between RMG out-of-touch management and unheard workers.
"Being an owner of a small factory, I know most workers personally. As a result, I can consult with them regularly, and I never faced any major unrest so far. When there is a problem, the workers can meet me directly and I will try to solve the problem," Chowdhury says.
In fiscal 2009-10, he exported garment items worth $2.1million. Like other manufacturers, but he has also been facing shortages of gas and power to run the factory.
Small factories face more difficulties than big ones, as they must either import or purchase fabrics from the local market. Bigger manufactures may have their own spinning and weaving mills or import in bulk from China.
Chowdhury, a chartered accountant turned entrepreneur, started his career as an assistant manager of finance at Desh Garments, one of the pioneering garment factories in Bangladesh in 1982. But he is happy running a small factory.
"I do not want to expand my business right at this moment, as I can hardly afford the costs," he says.
He says the woven manufacturers have to import the majority of their raw materials, mainly from China, because Bangladesh does not weave cloth in quantity. At present, the nation can supply only 20-35 percent of the needs for the woven sub-sector.
The knitwear sub-sector can purchase more than 70 percent from the local yarn spinners, he observes. (RMG factory owners' estimates are lower than those of weavers).
Company hoping workers are another problem for the small factories. Big factories can afford to lose a worker because three others might cover her or him.
But the small factories might not have another workers trained for that role. Even still, at least 20 percent of the capacity of big factories remains idle due to the shortage of skilled manpower in the garment sector, Chowdhury estimates.
As a result, many workers do not want to stay with a small factory for a long time, he says. He opposes foreign investment in the garment sector because the business already has too many entrepreneurs, he says.
"We may lose production of some high-quality garment items in the absence of foreign investment here, but at the end, the local investors will come up with the quality," says Chowdhury, who started his business in 1998.
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