Tens of thousands of garment workers walked off their jobs in Bangladesh Oct. 31 demanding a wage increase as the rising cost of living makes it impossible for them to provide for their families. With a minimum monthly salary of roughly $100, the country’s 4 million garment workers — more than half of them women — are among the lowest paid in the world. And they haven’t had a wage increase since 2023.
Bangladesh is the second largest exporter of clothing in the world after China. Manufacturers there are major suppliers to global giants like Walmart, H&M, the Gap and Levi Strauss. While garment workers struggle to put food on their tables, their labor generates $39 billion a year, some 80% of the country’s entire export earnings. The annual rate of inflation in Bangladesh was 8.34% in September, with costs sharply increasing for food, housing, transport and other essentials.
“We don’t want to take to the streets,” Sardar, a 23-year-old who started working in garment factories as a child, told Vogue magazine. “But there is no affordable healthcare for us. Landlords keep raising house rents every January. The prices of staple food items and cooking gas have gone up several times during this period, and our wages have remained the same.”
“We can barely afford one proper meal a day,” Laili Begum, a 37-year-old garment worker and mother of two, told Al Jazeera. She said her children had to drop out of school because she could no longer pay for their education.
Garment worker Rasel Khan said he is sinking into debt to help his family, which includes his mother and younger brother along with his wife and child. “It’s impossible to support a family on this income anymore. Prices keep rising and we have to borrow money just to survive.”
More than 650 shops shut down
The protests shut down more than 650 garment shops in Dhaka, the capital, and surrounding cities. The government answered with thousands of police who fired tear gas and used stun grenades and water cannons, killing at least one worker and injuring dozens. More than 100 were arrested, including at least 10 union leaders.
As the workers dug in their heels, the government convened a wage board Nov. 1, which promised to increase the minimum wage in January, but failed to say what the increase would be. Workers are demanding a minimum raise of $240 a month.
Babul Akhter, who represents the garment workers on the wage board, encouraged them to go back to work while waiting for the details of the wage agreement to be announced. He demanded the release of all arrested workers and called for the frame-up cases filed against them to be thrown out. After a week on strike, most workers returned to work Nov. 8. “We have placed our demands,” Khairul Mamun Mintu, a union leader at the Bangladesh Garment Workers Trade Union Center, told Vogue. If that “doesn’t work, we will have to take to the streets again.”
Hundreds of workers in Bangladesh have been killed in recent years as the bosses push profits with little concern for the safety of the workers. At least 16 died in a garment factory fire last October. Some 52 workers, trapped inside behind illegally locked doors, died in a food factory fire in 2021. And in 2013, more than 1,100 workers were killed when an eight-story building housing garment factories near Dhaka collapsed from shoddy construction.
The bosses say the wage demands of the workers would jeopardize their own jobs, driving production costs above those in India, the fourth-largest apparel exporter and an increasingly strong competitor. They also point to demands from buyers in Europe and North America for lower prices, something “we have no choice but to accept,” one boss said.