Science fiction books and the sci-fi movies of Hollywood often portrays that machine will rise and they will take over the human labor. While digging the data of sweater factories collected by the field officers of DRFM-B, we also feel that the machine is rising for sweater industry. This machine is Jacquard Machine. One worker can control four Jacquard Machines. As a result, if you own a small sweater factory having 40 Jacquard Machines, say you can run the factory very easily recruiting just 10 workers.

Our data verification activities identified sweater factories having very small worker number of workers.  We sorted those factories based on numbers and called the contact person of those factories. We learned that jacquard machines are more popular among the manufacturers as it eases and increases productivity. We also feel that many manual machines-oriented sweater factories are either moving toward jacquard machines or marking their exits from the export-oriented market as it is very difficult to meet export demand using manual machines. Our field officers and even a stakeholder told us that investors of small markets in Dhaka (such as in Badda) and even in Northern Bangladesh (such as Rangpur) are setting the market-out manual machines for meeting the local demand.

When we were going through the data on the sweater industry, we also reviewed some relevant literature.  The EPB data tells us, Bangladesh earned $3.67 billion in the fiscal year 2017-18, which is 9.32% higher compared to the $3.36 billion it earned in FY 2016-17. A recent study of CPD explained that the sweater industry of Bangladesh is taking advantage of the rising global demand for sweaters as the window of sweater sales in the western world has been expanded from four to six months due to climate change.

We believe that further proofs of the technological shift of sweater industry from manual to automation (jacquard) can provide us with more in-depth understanding of the industry. We think that from the local context of sweater factories, we can hear more stories about how the industry is adapting its own transformation along with the transformation of the international market. Then, we will reveal the reality and will make ourselves free from the feeling that we are seeing a sci-fi movie on the rise of the machines in the sweater industry.