Restaurant workers
Low wages, long working hours
Faisal Mahmud, Dhaka
When Amzad Ali first arrived in Dhaka from Gobindaganj in Gaibandha district in 2012, he had brought what he calls his two assets of that timea Nokia phone and his expertise with the tandoor.
Six years down the line, he has upgraded to a Chinese smartphone, but still spends hours beside the cylindrical drum-like oven and brings out naan after naan that have crisp exteriors and are airy inside.
I have long wanted to be a kebab karigor (kebab chef), but the owner clearly doesnt want to give me the chance, Ali said with a sigh. He had started working at a restaurant in Gobindaganj as a cleaner at the age of 14, before graduating to a waiter a few years later. One morning when the restaurant owner brought a tandoor to attract an increasing number of afternoon snack-diners with naan and kebab, Ali was asked to be the naan karigor.
They were short-staffed then and by that time, I had attained considerable cooking skills, especially in dough making. So I got the chance, he added.
After working for four years, Ali opted to come to Dhaka following a relatives advice that he could earn a lot of money in the city with his skill.
Ali now earns around Tk. 16,000 working for more than 13 hours a day, six days a week, and sometimes even without a day off. I used to earn Tk. 3,500 at Gobindaganj, but I was with my family there, he said.
I can barely manage to send Tk. 10,000 to my family per month. This amount is nothing nowadays. If I could become a kebab karigor, I could have earned Tk. 10,000 more by getting a job in an upscale restaurant at Gulshan. But unfortunately, I still havent been able to gain experience with meat, he rued.
Unregulated Industry
Like Ali, thousands of restaurant workers in the country face three constants in their professional liveslong hours, low pay and the hope of climbing up a severely unregulated employment ladder, guided only by the whims of restaurant owners.
According to the Bangladesh Restaurant Owners Association (BROA), there are over 18 lakh restaurant workers engaged in over 20,000 restaurants in the country. Over half of these workers are employed in Dhaka and Chattagramtwo of the biggest cities. About 70 per cent of these restaurants are known as Bhat er Hotel, meaning their menus mostly offer rice, paratha and curries.
To cater to the needs of evolving taste buds, many restaurants have also started an afternoon menu comprising naan, kebab and grilled chicken. The remaining 30 per cent restaurants are fast-food joints, Chinese and upscale multi-cuisine restaurants.
Almost the entire restaurant industry in Bangladesh relies on workers who are skilled in either cooking, waiting jobs, cleaning or even managing the supply chain and work as per an informal apprentice-mentor model.
There is no such thing as industry standards (or collective bargaining) in a business in which the majority of entities are independent entrepreneurs. Each restaurant is its own fiefdom, subject to the laws of the land, but operating in metaphorical and literal darkness, governed by the decree or benevolence of their owners. This has made the whole industry a highly unregulated one, resulting in frequent abuse of workers rights.
Most of us started with cleaning dishes. We didnt get paid for our work; we got food and most importantly training, said Khokon Mia, the main chef of Alifa Restaurant at Bakshibazaar.
I got my training in cooking from several ustads (mentors). They taught me how to skin and slice a chicken, how to cook fish curries and some chora masala (secret spices) for kacchi biriyani. I put in years of labour to learn all this, he added.
According to Mia, many poor children work in a kitchen for free to learn or in the hope of being hired. And none of the children works less than 12 hours a day. Child labour is not something that concerns anyone here. There is no such thing as weekends at the initial stage. Once you become a cook or a senior waiter, then you can think of getting a day off. The payment obviously is still low if you consider the long hours that we need to put in, he said, adding that as the main chef, he earns Tk .35,000 per month.
No guarantee of rights
In May 2017, the government had set the minimum wage for hotel and restaurant workers at Tk. 3,710 as monthly gross pay from Tk. 1,750, which many experts concerned believe is well below the standard for an industry as important as food.
Rafiqul Islam, general secretary of the Bangladesh Hotel Restaurant Sweetmeat Sramik Federation, told The Independent: Most of the workers in the restaurant industry dont even get the minimum pay. Go and see how many work in exchange for only food and training. This is an industry that is highly exploited by the owners.
According to Rafiqul, even workers in established and upscale restaurants are given a paltry salary. If you ask a waiter at a Chinese restaurant about his/her salary, he/she will tell you that the owner asks them to live on tips, he said.
Even though the workers had long been demanding festival and overtime allowances, these provisions were not included in the last declared wage structure.
Anwar Hossain, senior vice-president of BROA, agreed that the restaurant industry in the country was highly unregulated and workers rights were not ensured. This has been going on for years. Young men with almost no education and skills come to our restaurants for work. We give them that and sometimes accommodation. They also get the most important thingtraining, he said.
Hossain, who is the owner of Purnima caf at Gulshan, said he does not mind paying good money for skilled restaurant workers. I have cooks in my restaurant who are paid Tk. 40,000 and managers get Tk. 35,000. They work for fixed hours and get days off.
However, the problem is that most of the workers start with zero skill and experience and no businessman would want to pay for that unless they put in long hours and hard labour, he added.
