"Survey of Garment Workers’ Expenses to Come", 28 Jul 2015

Hoping to help fill the void in reliable data that has stymied past negotiations on the minimum wage for the country’s garment workers, an international team of labor rights groups...hired a local research firm to find out exactly how much the workers are spending on living costs. They expect to have the results ready by early September, in time to inform the ongoing negotiations that will deliver a new minimum wage for the sector for 2016...The other groups supporting the effort are Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Swiss-based IndustriALL Global Union, and the Workers’ Activities Bureau of the International Labor Organization (ILO). “It’s to give the unions some sort of quantifiable figures to take into the wage negotiations,” Mr. Conklin [country director for the U.S.-based Solidarity Center] said. He said the researchers would start by training about 15 unionists with local IndustriALL affiliates, who would in turn survey about 700 garment workers across the country on their current expenses.