Awareness Training on Workers’ Health, Sanitation & Wellbeing in workplace held in Dhaka

Washim Mia, Staff Reporter: With a specific focus on the workers’ health and wellbeing  of readymade garment sector, lifeblood of the economy of Bangladesh, a 2 days long  awareness training on ‘Workers’ Health, Sanitation & wellbeing in workplace: Laws and Policies’ was held on 22-23 September at the conference hall of Royal Marino Hotel in Dhaka.

The session, with the funding support from Working With Women- II project, was organized jointly by Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies-BILS, Global Sustainable Certification Services Limited-GSCS and Bangladesh Apparel Professionals Society-BAPS in collaboration with SNV Netherlands Development Organization.

The objective of the training was to reinforce delegates’ understanding of existing National & International standards related to health, Sanitation & well-being conditions at workplace, strengthen their competency to conduct workplace assessment by using exclusive tool developed and enable delegates’ ability to design, develop and implement effective health, Sanitation & well-being programme in their respective organizations.

The session was conducted by the internationally recognized trainer Mr. Abdul Mottaleb, Managing Director- Global Sustainable Certification Services Limited-GSCS in which 28 delegates from different garments factories and audit farms attended.

Mr. Abdul Mottaleb was saying to RMG Times, ‘‘Healthy employees are productive employees. Sound health is the first condition for all of us to be ensured. In terms of our garments sector where more than 4 million workers are working, the importance of health, proper sanitation and wellbeing is immense. So, we have come up with an assessment tool to measure the health, sanitation and wellbeing status of a factory based on the National and International rules and regulations. As there is no individual parameter, still, for the garments factories for self assessment in terms of health, sanitation and wellbeing of the workers, the tool developed by us is going to cover that particular area for further improvement. We see many factories consuming a huge amount of money for their workers’ health improvement but in an informal way. This assessment tool will provide them an effective way to figure it out’’.

Major(Retd.) Md. Mizanur Rahman Khan, President- Bangladesh Apparel Professionals Society-BAPS and Ms. Nazma Yesmin, Project Coordinator- Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies-BILS were present at the certificate of participation distributing moment. They handed over the certificates to each of the delegates.

The highly interactive session came to an end with a note that everyone has a personal action plan now to follow in future to assess the level of his/her factory in the context of health, sanitation and wellbeing of the workers and take corrective and preventive actions accordingly.