About 65 per cent of workers say they would prefer to work on lower floor, 30 per cent workers think their factories are highly risky in case of fire while 47 per cent opined they cannot leave the building quickly in case of emergency.
According to a progress report by the North American apparel companies' coalition, 27 per cent of the workers feel they are not given sufficient training on how to protect themselves.
The Alliance conducted a 'worker baseline survey' among more than 3,200 workers in 28 garment factories of the country from November to December 2013, and published a report titled "A Six-month Progress Report of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety' on its official website on January 30.
In addition to the survey, 10 focus groups interviews were conducted off-site with 101 participants in three regions of the country to obtain more nuanced information on fire and other health and safety issues. Participants were specifically chosen from factories that had not received training provided or sponsored by Alliance member-companies.
"The primary purpose of the survey and off-site interviews was to better understand the current level of awareness of health and safety risks and what workers believe needs to be done to improve safety and reduce risks," the report said.
The worker baseline survey consisted of 50 questions assessing workers' perspective on health and safety from seven dimensions: knowledge, awareness, training, experience, worker integration, perception of risks at work and perception of management concern for health and safety, it said adding the survey points to the need for a comprehensive and consistent health and safety training curriculum that can be implemented systematically across factories and that corrects for some of the issues that have come to light in this survey.
Nearly 65 per cent of workers in focus groups indicated they would prefer to work on a low floor for safety reasons, even if working on a high floor offered additional financial rewards and in 64 per cent of surveyed factories, workers said they had witnessed fire incidents. This is in line with the focus group results, where participants in all but one of the 10 discussions reported experiencing fires, the report said.
According to the survey, about 87 per cent workers have participated in a evacuation drill in the last three months while 45 per cent had not been trained on fire safety. About 73 per cent workers opined that health and safety was part of their orientation training.
"Workers are at the heart of this initiative. They bring an important perspective from the factory floor that informs our work and serves as a powerful reminder of why we are committed to this effort," the report added.
The survey also found that male workers are more readily offered training; most participants have taken part in evacuation drills, most were conducted during daytime hours leaving night shift workers neglected; drills were often conducted inappropriately, such as with a failure to count participants; others were only partly conducted, for example, evacuating workers to lower floors rather than fully outside their buildings; and that lags in frequency and quality of training have consequences for workers.
The progress report also said member-signatories of the Alliance inspected about 222 garment factories covering 31 per cent of the coalition's expected units though the inspection started since before the inception of the Alliance.
The Alliance Committee of Experts is now conducting an independent analysis of those inspections to evaluate their compliance with the Alliance Standard finalised and harmonised with the standards of its partners like Accord and National Tripartite Plan of Action.
"Factories not meeting the Standard will be re-inspected by Qualified Inspectors - our list of which will be released in February 2014 - as will all factories for which inspections are yet to take place," it said reiterating its commitment to complete the fire safety, structural and electrical inspections by July 2014.
Inspections will then prompt action plans to be used by factories to improve safety conditions for garment workers, and corrective steps will be taken when necessary, the progress report that focused on common safety inspection standards, worker training and empowerment, local engagement and capacity building, financial commitments and transparency and sharing, said.
