Hundreds of Bangladesh garment factories close amid wage protests

“At least 29” protesters have been arrested and “hundreds” of garment factories in Bangladesh have closed, BBC News reported. The BBC report placed the unrest on its fourth day in Dhaka after a dispute over wages in Bangladesh’s readymade garment sector.

BBC News said protesters closed roads and vandalised factories as the demonstrations continued. The account did not name affected plants or provide a plant-by-plant closure tally.

What has the wage review changed?

On 1 November, the government announced that it had formed a board to review garment-worker wages. Prime Minister Tarique Rahman held an emergency meeting with ministers. The board’s stated aim was to determine a new minimum wage for the sector.

The Daily Star reported that the government had named Dhaka University Professor Mosleh Uddin Ahmen as the board’s independent member. Representatives for employers and workers also joined the body, which aims to determine a new minimum wage. The appointment put all three groups in the same review process, but the report recorded no agreed rate or implementation date.

The report placed the board’s formation on Sunday and said protests continued afterward. That left sourcing teams facing two uncertainties at once: the eventual wage cost and the operating status of factories caught in the disruption.

IndustriALL Bangladesh Council, citing rising living costs, had called for a minimum monthly wage of TK32,085, reported as US$250. The proposal was more than double the current standard wage, while garment workers took home an average of TK13,000, or US$105, per month.

These figures describe different benchmarks rather than one settled wage: average take-home pay, the current standard and a proposal from IndustriALL. Buyers should keep those categories separate when testing supplier cost pressure and contingency assumptions.

The last wage review took place in 2023, when the minimum monthly wage rose to TK12,500, or US$114. A worker representative on the Bangladesh Minimum Wage Board had sought TK20,393, or US$184.60, leaving the approved increase substantially below the demand.

Bangladesh ranks as the world’s second-largest apparel exporter after China and employs more than 4 million workers in the sector. Its factories supply H&M, Primark and Inditex, making wage stability and factory operating conditions material to buyers sourcing ready-made garments in Bangladesh.

The BBC report did not tie the closures to one named brand. It linked them to a national wage dispute centered on Dhaka, but did not show how many affected factories served H&M, Primark, Inditex or other overseas buyers.

The report cited no new order commitments from those brands and named no supplier shutdowns. The closure count therefore remained a broad BBC News estimate, not a verified list buyers could match against purchase orders or delivery dates. Sourcing teams could not calculate factory closure exposure, production recovery or labor-cost exposure from the published figures alone.

The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association had not responded to Just Style’s request for comment at the time of writing. Its account of the closures, arrests and wage negotiations was therefore unavailable for this report.

What should buyers do next?

For buyers, the immediate sourcing decision is to keep the existing wage standard in cost assumptions until the government board determines a replacement. They should request plant-level operating updates from suppliers, track whether employer and worker representatives agree, and avoid treating either TK32,085 or TK20,393 as a compliance baseline; both remain demands rather than settled rates.