Lives and Livelihoods of Floating Laborers in Dhaka City: Survey Dataset, 2025-2026

Abstract

This dataset contains cross-sectional survey microdata on 750 floating day laborers interviewed face to face in Bengali at seven open-air labor markets, locally called sromiker hat, in Dhaka city and its northwestern periphery, Bangladesh (Mirpur-1, Gabtoli, Amin Bazar, Hemayetpur, Panthapath, Azimpur, and Padma-r Mor) between 4 October 2025 and 7 February 2026. Respondents were recruited through venue-based time-location sampling during dawn hiring sessions and screened for active work seeking, minimum age under the approved protocol, non-repeat participation, and oral informed consent. The curated matrix holds 172 variables per respondent across fifteen questionnaire sections covering demography and family, migration history, occupational profile and skills, market attendance and hiring networks, work days, earnings, wage arrears and bargaining, housing and urban services, the eight-item Food Insecurity Experience Scale with a 30-day recall, self-rated health, occupational injury and safety practice, the five-item WHO-5 wellbeing index, social support and borrowing, policing and harassment, identity documents and social protection, shocks and coping, and policy preferences, together with a sequential identifier, standardized district of origin with derived division, and FIES and WHO-5 summary scores. The deposit includes the dataset workbook with value labels, a codebook workbook with per-variable summary statistics and an itemized processing log of every corrected or imputed cell, and a UTF-8 CSV copy. Sub-district geography was removed for disclosure control, and the file contains no direct identifiers.