Factory girls seek cash in other avenues

LA Lei says she is 19 years old, but her white, polka-dotted skirt, scuffed plastic flip-flops and nervous smile make her look much younger. From her skinny, twig-like wrists that poke out from the sleeves of her jean-jacket, to her knobbly knees and pretty pink Chap Stick, everything about her is angular, pubescent and poised.
Three months ago La Lei had never spent the night with a man; now she has lost count of the number she has been with.
“On a good day it can be three or four,” she says, looking away.
“This week there’s been important people coming from the airport so there’s been too many police to work much. It’s really bad for us when that happens,” she says, referring to the convoys of vehicles that have escorted a visiting dignitary past the stretch of Pyay Road where she works.
Until early last year, La Lei worked in a soap factory in Yangon. But the factory was damaged by Cyclone Nargis and for four months she found herself without a job.
Her family, who lived in the Ayeyarwady delta, had fallen on even harder times in the wake of the storm. Despite her growing debt to moneylenders, La Lei decided to bring her family to live with her in Yangon.
Options for work were limited. La Lei’s formal education had ended after Third Standard, and her father died when she was 12 years old. She has been working ever since, but the K30,000 a month paid by factories – with little opportunity for overtime these days – would not be enough to support her family.
“Then my mother had a heart attack and we had to pay the bills and on top of that we were in debt,” she says.
“I didn’t know what to do, but then another girl who used to work at the same factory as me introduced my to a way to make more money. Now I can afford to look after all of my family.”
“I’ve never told them what I do,” she adds. “I will never tell them. If I could just make money in another way I would do it. But there is no other option.”
According to the Post Nargis Joint Assessment released in July, nearly 45 percent of the K2000 billion in damage suffered by Myanmar industry in the wake of the cyclone occurred in the industrial parks on the outskirts of Yangon.
To add to the burden, within months of the storm the effects of the global economic crisis were also being felt in Myanmar, particularly among female staff in Yangon factories.
“Demand [for products from] those factories that rely on overseas orders was down by 70 percent this February compared with the same time in 2008,” U Than Shwe, the manager Prince Kanaung estate agency in Hlaing Tharyar township, told The Myanmar Times two weeks ago.
U Myint Soe, the chairman of the Myanmar Garment Association, said the second half of last year saw a 16 to 20 percent fall in cutting, manufacturing and packaging at garment factories in Yangon.
“Factories have shortened working hours, which means workers’ wages have fallen by about 30 percent,” he said.
“The women in the factories used to earn K30,000 to K50,000 on average, but 30 percent of that was for overtime, which has now been cut. Workers have lost a lot of their income.”
Dr Frank Smithius, the country director of Médecins Sans Frontières Holland
(Artsen Zonder Grenzen, AZG), said that in the past factory closures have been a factor in pushing women into unemployment and dangerous or exploitative professions.
However he was careful to point out that the ramifications of the economic downturn or cyclone damage on the sex industry go beyond mere economics and are not easy to accurately predict.
“It was a similar story when there was the American boycott of garment factories,” he said. “There were suddenly 20,000 women without work, so it can be a concern for a period of time. But if the economy is going bad then the buying power is also going down.”
“It is about the market – it’s not that because you have a bad economy you will suddenly have 3 million sex workers. Thailand is richer but it has more sex workers than Cambodia or Laos, for example.”
Predicting the impact of the economic downturn and cyclone-induced hardship on the sex industry may be difficult, but for organisations struggling to combat HIV/AIDS, these two events and their adverse affects on women are a major concern.
“In Myanmar you have what is fairly typical in the region – there are specific high [HIV transmission] risk groups: sex workers, intravenous drug users and men who have sex with men,” said Markus Buhler, an advisor for the United Nations Program on AIDS (UNAIDS). “Programs [fighting the transmission of AIDS] target these groups.”
“In May and June 2008, we conducted rapid assessments through partners working with sex workers to see whether there were any changes in the pattern and scope of the sex work in the Nargis-affected areas, including Pathein and Yangon,” he said.
“We saw no real change. But now with the high number of NGO and construction workers in the area, there are a lot of single males with money, which can be a concern and maybe means we need to conduct an assessment now.”
Population Services Information (PSI) provides health care facilities and AIDS awareness training to some 25,000 sex workers in fifteen cities throughout the country. At their clinic in Yangon sex workers expressed worries about the slowing of the economy in the last year.
“There are more sex workers on the streets now,” said a 38 year-old mother of nine. “There are also fewer clients and those clients don’t have much money now. The price for sex has gone down drastically. Yesterday a client offered me 1000K – and I had to accept it because sometimes now there are no clients in a day.”
She is sat amongst a group of hardened 40-year-olds. Most have children to support, many are divorced and all have been in the industry for a minimum of two years.
“There’s almost no one who does this to raise money for their own education or clothes,” said one 42-year old. “Women do it for their families, because someone got sick, or you’re the eldest daughter or your husband left you. If there were other work where we could get paid the same amount of money we would do it.”
In her seven years on the street she has seen wages for sex workers fall from 100 – 200,000K a month to 70 – 90,000 now.
Mr Habibur Rahman, the Director of PSI’s National Targeted Outreach Program has worked with sex workers in Myanmar for six years. During that time he said he had seen a rise in prices on every basic commodity, except the price of sex.
“The only one thing that the price has not increased in the last five years is the price for sex work,” he said. “It was fifteen thousand kyat in a night club fives years ago. It is the same now. It tells us that demand is not increasing in combination perhaps with supply increasing.”
The link between the sex industry and economic slow-down in other industries was not as expected, said Mr Rahman.
“What we found [after Nargis] was that the number of sex workers increased in other cities, not the delta region. Sex work increased in upper Myanmar and other places, like Bago,” he said. “Most of the sex workers migrated from the delta region to the unaffected areas. There was not that much money in the delta region straight after Nargis – so they could not sell sex, so they moved to the areas where there was no impact from Nargis. There was a twenty percent increase in our other clinics. After a certain period perhaps they will migrate back to the delta.”
“If money and men are somewhere – sex workers [are likely to] be there,” he continued, highlighting the need for more research into parts of the delta where re-construction is taking place. With regards the factory downfalls Mr Rahman also has concerns.
“Any time, any place, any country when a women-orientated sector, like the garment sector, women will look for alternative jobs – they can join to the self employment sector the sex industry is a big self employment sector,” he said.
The US-based NGO World Vision, which works on trafficking issues, has reported the emergence of a few tell-tale patterns that might indicate an upsurge in the sex industry.
“We cannot definitely know if numbers have gone up, but perhaps we will see the results in the next year or two as the economy gets worse,” said Hnin Hnin Nwe, World Vision’s trafficking program associate.
“We have already had some cases of internal trafficking recently, where the family has lost daughters that are about 18 years, 16 years and 17 years, and after they find them at the karaoke bar or the massage bar.
“Someone nearby sent them to these bars because the girls want to work. But they are not aware before they go that they will have to do sexual work. Before this year we were not familiar with these cases,” she said.