Social Sustainability Challenges and the Role of Middle Managers: Case of the Ready-Made Garment Industry in Bangladesh

Over the last decades, the ready-made garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh has experienced a remarkable economic growth becoming the backbone of the country’s economy. Nevertheless, the industry is still faced with unsustainable business practices that threaten to hinder the sector’s progress in the future. Among others, these include long working hours, unhealthy work environment, restricted ability of workers to organize, gender-based discrimination and shortage of skilled workforce, in particular mid-level managers. Hence, improvement of managerial knowledge and skills is seen as a necessity for the development of Bangladeshi RMG firms and introduction of sustainable business practices. According to available research, general obstacles like expat hiring, discrepancy in supply and demand between the educational and industrial sectors, stark male to female occupational segregation and limited training opportunities impede the position of midlevel managers in the Bangladesh RMG sector. In addition to this, our findings indicate that mid-level managers in the Bangladesh RMG sector lack strategic knowledge of social sustainability issues. Furthermore, we perceived that mid-level managers possess underdeveloped soft skills, lack a deeper understanding of gender-related topics and specific needs of the female workers. Lastly, there is a lack of incentives from the side of the top-level management and factory owners in terms of providing mid-level managers further training to acquire the skills necessary for better performance. To improve conditions, mid-level managers in the Bangladesh RMG sector need training programmes to address the specific challenges that they are facing, depending whether they work in the administration side or production sector. Furthermore, we propose to change the perception that “compliance is the need of the buyer, not a need of factory”, to foster a female-friendly work environment and enhance the representation of women in mid-level management positions, recognize social dialogue as the enabler of healthy industrial relations climate, arrange regular sustainability training for the managers and reduce over-dependency on the donors for training arrangements and undertake longterm industry-education partnership strategies for developing local semi-mid-level and mid-level managers.