Dutch-German agreed to work together for improving condition of textile industry across Asia

Efforts being made to improve textile industry as textile workers across South Asia are badly paid. According to recent media report in The Washington Post, a prominent US daily newspaper, Cambodian textile workers receive lower wages than those in India. Indian textile workers receive the second lowest wages in the world, despite India being one of the world’s leading textile-exporting countries, followed Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China and Thailand.

According to the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands and Germany has agreed to work together to better working conditions and wages for millions of textile workers in Asia.
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At their first meeting in Berlin, Lilianne Ploumen, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, and her German counterpart, Gerd Müller, agreed to join forces in a bid to improve labour conditions in the textile industry.

The collaboration will develop through work with the European fashion industry, governments, employers and unions in the countries concerned, the ministers said, as well as involvement from the International Labour Organisation.

Müller said that it’s vital that social and environmental standards improve in manufacturing countries in Asia. An important factor in this will be changing our own consumers’ behavior pattern.

By working together, they can improve enhance the impact of their plans to improve the working conditions of millions of people, Ploumen added.

Besides Asian countries, the other countries, who textile workers received lower wages are Jordan, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, El Salvador, Turkey and Mexico.