Bangladesh has set up a wage board to review pay in its garment industry after two days of protests by workers demanding a minimum monthly wage of more than double the current rate. The announcement did not end the unrest — thousands continued to demonstrate around Dhaka on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported.
The demand
Workers are asking for 30,000 taka a month, about US$242. The current minimum is 12,500 taka, roughly US$101. They say the rising cost of food, housing, transport and health care has sharply eroded what their pay buys.
The new board has six members, drawn from the government, the workers and the factory owners, and is tasked with setting a new minimum wage.
What happened on the ground
The protests began on Saturday. About 30 garment factories on the outskirts of Dhaka, in the Ashulia industrial area, declared holidays rather than open — a figure Hiru News independently reported, describing owners as having temporarily closed close to 30 leading plants.
Police fired tear gas and sound grenades at demonstrators. Several people were injured, including police officers, and a police vehicle was set on fire.
Despite the board’s formation, the demonstrations did not stop. Labour and employment adviser M Sakhawat Hossain Chowdhury said the matter was settled: “The issue of forming the wage board has been resolved. There will be no more problems now.”
Labour and Employment Minister Ariful Haque Chowdhury warned that prolonged closures and production stoppages could delay export shipments and payments from international buyers, creating fresh difficulties for manufacturers and workers alike.
Why it matters beyond Bangladesh
Bangladesh runs the world’s second-largest garment industry after China’s, worth about 10 per cent of its GDP and the bulk of its foreign earnings. It supplies many of the same Western buyers that Sri Lankan manufacturers sell to, and it is the benchmark against which the region’s apparel costs are measured — business figures meeting in Colombo last month named Bangladesh and Vietnam as the examples Sri Lanka should learn from in building scale.
A wage settlement in Dhaka therefore resets the cost floor for a market Sri Lanka competes in directly.
Not reported
Neither source gives a total for arrests or a nationwide count of how many workers stopped work. No timetable has been published for the wage board’s decision, and neither filing says whether the 30,000-taka demand is being treated as a starting position.
Two verified newsrooms. Hiru’s filing is a short relay of foreign reporting and carries the factory-closure count and the scale of the wage demand; the detail of the wage board, the officials’ remarks and the policing comes from Al Jazeera.
