Occupational Health And Safety Management In RMG Sector Of Bangladesh

The ready-made garments RMG industry plays a vital role to augment the socio-economic development of Bangladesh. However workers health and safety issue in this sector still less focused even though recent time increasing accident rate and loss of lives in some deadly incidents like accidents in Rana Plaza and Tazreen Fashion attack keen attention from home and abroad regarding fire hazards and building safety. In this circumstances this study aims to depict overall scenario about occupational health and safety of workers in RMG factories and identify occupational health and safety factors which have an impact on workers performance as well as factories efficiency. Fire risk index FRI of various factories is occupied to get an overview of fire safety and relative importance of occupational health and safety factors are identified by relative important index RII. Principal component analysis PCA is conducted to investigate the significance of occupational health and safety factors categorized in the variables. Then cause and effect diagram is developed to identify key causes behind musculoskeletal disorder and occupational accident. The relative important index RII shows that factories are relatively more concern about health hazard and emergency situation rather than working condition. Prolong working time is the most common in the factories which result in workers sufferings from lower back pain. Most of the workers are injured through needle piercing as negligence of using needle guard which is the root cause. The study also reveals that standard working condition augments factories performance in term of efficiency while accident rate impediment the factories from achieving target efficiency.