Bangladesh garment workers shut hundreds of factories demanding doubled wages

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Thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh shut down factories for an eighth day, blocking a highway through Ashulia, the industrial belt outside Dhaka, even after a national wage board agreed to introduce a revised pay structure starting in December. More than 100 factories in Ashulia alone stopped work during the day; police used tear gas and sound grenades after protesters threw bricks and damaged police vehicles, according to Mohammad Mominul Islam Bhuiyan, superintendent of Ashulia Industrial Police.

The wage board has agreed on timing but not on amounts — and that omission is what keeps workers in the streets. They want the monthly minimum lifted from 12,500 taka to 30,000 taka, roughly $240. 'The prices of everything have gone up, but wages have not,' Shilpi Khatun, a garment worker, told reporters. Since Saturday, the protests have closed hundreds of factories across the country, and Border Guard Bangladesh personnel have been deployed to the main industrial zones.

The workers' negotiating position is weaker than their numbers suggest, but the squeeze on everyone else is real. Clothing accounts for more than 80 percent of Bangladesh's export earnings and the industry employs around 4 million people, making the country the world's second-largest garment exporter after China. H&M, Walmart and Zara-owner Inditex buy here because wages are low and market access duty-free; factory owners warn the shutdowns will delay shipments during the peak export-order season. In Savar and Gazipur, many workers returned to their jobs on Thursday while Ashulia burned its shifts — a sign the unrest is containable factory by factory, but costly to the calendar.

What the wage board calls a raise in December will arrive as a single number imposed on an entire supply chain. Western brands set the prices; factory owners pass the pressure to wages; the state sends Border Guard to keep the factories running. The arrangement produced four decades of growth on the premise that 12,500 taka was survivable. Workers walking out of morning shifts onto the highway are disputing exactly that premise, with their feet, one factory at a time.