In the early evenings, Mae Aye Win scans the windows of shophouses near San Pya market in Yangon’s Thingangyun Township for rental signs. She’s looking for a place to open her own business, a tailor’s shop she may name after herself.
She thinks about her shop constantly while waiting for customers on the street, she says. Some slow down to appraise her and if she responds with a smile they may approach her.
“I try to be discreet. I don’t want it to be obvious that I’m a sex worker,” she explains.
Up until February, Mae Aye Win stitched sleeves onto polyester jackets and coats at a garment factory on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city.
These were sold at Bestseller outlets in Canada, according to shipping data, which also shows the factory – operated by Myanmar Dongtai Garments Co Ltd – made shirts for New York city-based Emmanuel Couture and vests for another American brand, Cozt Casual.
Mae Aye Win, 32, has worked in garment factories since she was 17, a 15-year stretch she refers to as “my previous life.” The best time began in 2016, after her first daughter was born (she has two). Orders from global brands surged and overtime was plentiful, she explains.
The pandemic was the first blow to a rapidly expanding sector that was projected to employ 1.6 million workers in Myanmar by 2026.
Mae Aye Win managed to hang on, however. “I kept my job during Covid, but I lost all my overtime,” she explains. “It was a hard time, but then it got worse. Everything fell apart after the military took over.”
Like other garment workers interviewed for this report, she identified the rampant inflation that followed the coup as the main cause of the desperation she has been pushed into. “Before [the coup] prices were reasonable. Now, everything is more expensive, but our salaries haven’t kept pace,” she says.
Inflation raging
Ei Wai has been working in garment factories since she was 17. Now 30, she earns a monthly wage of 360,000 kyats (about US$ 80 at the local exchange rate) at the last factory Mae Aye Win had been employed at. (This includes overtime and an attendance bonus.)
Before the coup she earned 240,000 kyat a month, but that went far further than the 360,000 kyats she gets now.
“Life was manageable before the coup. Prices were fair and I could make ends meet, but since the coup prices have skyrocketed,” she explains, becoming angry as she speaks. “Look at the cost of an egg,” she nearly shouts. “It used to be just 130 kyats, but now it’s at least 400 kyats. And it’s not just eggs. The price of everything from toothpaste to rent has doubled or tripled.”
Ei Wai says she was hoping to move to Myawaddy in Karen State to work at a factory near the border with Thailand, but this plan was scuppered by the fighting that erupted there in April. Now, she’s trying to get a job in Thailand but the recruitment and transport fees have more than doubled. “Now it costs more than 20,000 baht to get from Yangon to the Thai border,” she says. “I get paid in kyat. It’s worthless.”
Economist Jared Bissinger warns that wages at Myanmar’s garment factories are so low they can no longer feed families and could undermine a sector that had provided one of the few paths for young women from impoverished villages to enter the country’s formal economy.
Myanmar’s minimum wage has been 4,800 kyats a day since 2018. Two daily allowances of 1,000 kyat each were added last year and this year, but were not enough to keep up with inflation. Bissinger estimates that the consumer price index jumped about 88 percent between 2020 and the end of last year, while the cost of a typical meal – according to the International Food Policy Research Institute – surged 160 percent.
If the minimum wage at Myanmar’s garment factories had kept up with inflation it would be about 12,000 kyats a day now, instead of 6,800, Bissinger estimates.
Garment workers were quick to feel the impact of the February 2021 coup. A year later, 75 percent of those still employed reported that their incomes had declined, a UNDP survey of 1,600 employed and unemployed garment workers found. Two-thirds of those still employed reported that they had used up all of their savings, 53 percent had cut back on food, and 25 percent said they were feeding their children less.
Sex work
Mae Aye Win turned to sex work to feed her children. “I was desperate,” she recalls. “I needed food for my daughters.”
She was introduced to the trade by a former colleague. The friend introduced her to an “agent” who arranged meetings with clients in guesthouses. Several weeks later, when she had no customers to meet in guesthouses, Mae Aye Win started strolling along the sidewalk near San Pya in the evenings.
She says she can earn more than 800,000 kyats (about $180) a month from sex work. Based on the rates charged by other sex workers, and online ads, that could require several customers a night.
Mae Aye Win’s crisis is not unique. Workers at clinics that provide healthcare to sex workers in Yangon say that since late last year about half their clients have been former garment workers. They charge as little as 3,000 kyats (about 75 US cents) per customer, clinic staff say. These rates are consistent with ads on social media.
Clinic staff also say that sex workers are facing a surge in violence from customers in post-coup Myanmar. (The health clinic workers requested anonymity for themselves and their clinics to safeguard the services they provide.)
Reputational damage
Myanmar’s garment exports surged over 900 percent between 2012 and 2022, from about US$0.9 billion to US$9.2 billion, according to Eurocham Myanmar.
This was primarily driven by low wages, low taxes and duty-free access to Western markets.
This rapid growth, however, ended with the coup and the subsequent crackdown on unions.
Union representatives and labor rights activists responded by calling for divestment from Myanmar and an end to duty-free access to Western markets.
Facing reputational damage, most Western brands began exiting – or at least announcing they would exit – Myanmar.
Factory workers say working conditions have deteriorated since the coup, with some saying the exit of Western brands was making a bad situation worse.
“We don’t dare to make waves,” explains Thin Thin Ei, an employee at Eternal Fashion. The factory in Hlaing Thar Yar Township supplies the Chinese children’s apparel brand Balabala, according to workers and shipping data.
Thin Thin Ei who says she has been blacklisted for organizing unions at other factories keeps a low profile at Eternal Fashion. Unions are prohibited there and staff have to work overtime to keep their jobs, she says.
“Management doesn’t allow us to set up a union. Instead, we have a coordinating committee for workers, but its representatives are handpicked by factory management,” she explained, but adds: “It’s better than some other factories. They pay on time.”
Ei Wai says the cost of a job in Thailand keeps going up as her income falls.
Ma Aye Win hopes she can save enough money to open her tailor’s shop by the middle of next year, at the very latest. She had imagined she would open it by the end of this year.
Now, she says she can’t hang on much longer, but she will. She has no choice.
(The names of the garment workers have been changed for their protection.)
