Bangladeshi Cotton Textile Workers Set for Wage Increase

Jasmin Malik Chua
·2 min read

Bangladesh’s cotton textile workers are due for a minimum pay hike of their own, but they must be patient, the South Asian nation’s trade group for textile businesses has cautioned.

“Already the government has formed a minimum wage board for the cotton textile sector, and we expect the wages will be announced soon,” wrote the Bangladesh Textile Mills Association, or BTMA, in a press release on Friday. “The labor and employment secretary and the Minimum Wage Board have assured us that an announcement in this regard will come within two weeks.”

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The BTMA voiced concern about what it described as a “deteriorating law and order situation” at its member factories in and around the capital of Dhaka following the announcement of a new monthly minimum for their garment sector counterparts.

That increase, from 8,000 Bangladeshi taka ($73) to 12,500 taka ($114), has been decried by workers’ representatives as insufficient to keep up with the rising cost of living in Bangladesh. At the same time, suppliers say that they won’t be able to meet the increase if buyers don’t raise the prices they receive. So far, only H&M has explicitly told factories that it will absorb the extra cost, though labor groups say that this is the lowest possible bar for a brand. And while several brands have written to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in support of a higher threshold, Patagonia alone has publicly backed the 23,000 taka ($210) figure that garment workers have been seeking.

Reports of protests in the ready-made garment sector are erupting again, this time over whether factories are hewing to the new pay scale.

Bangladesh’s 5 million textile workers, spread out across 7,000 facilities, make even less than their 4.1 million cut-and-sew colleagues. Their monthly minimum of 5,710 taka ($52) hasn’t budged since 2018, when it was increased from the previous floor of 3,302 taka ($30).

The first wage board meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, the BTMA said, with Md Abdul Malek, general manager at Pahartali Textile and Hosiery Mills, serving as the owners’ representative and Shahjahan Saju, senior vice president at the same mill’s union, as the workers’ one.

The BTMA said that it’s in support of higher wages for workers, and that it will implement any increase “without delay,” adding that the organization is “in complete agreement with the government.”

“Workers at BTMA mills are being requested to be patient in this regard,” it added.