How Does Fashion Exploit the Garment Industry Workers in Bangladesh?

Part 1 — Introduction

The global fashion industry is worth over $2.5 trillion and employs more than 300 million people worldwide. Bangladesh is the second-largest garment exporter in the world, after China, accounting for approximately 84% of the country’s total export earnings. The country’s ready-made garment (RMG) sector employs around 4 million workers, over 80% of whom are women from rural and low-income backgrounds.

Despite the industry’s scale, garment workers in Bangladesh remain among the most economically vulnerable workers in the global economy. The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse — which killed 1,134 workers and injured over 2,500 — brought international attention to the systemic failures of the fast fashion supply chain. A decade later, the structural conditions that made Rana Plaza possible remain largely intact: wages below the poverty line, absence of collective bargaining rights, unsafe working conditions, and a buyer-driven pricing model that transfers risk entirely to workers at the bottom of the supply chain.

This paper examines how the fashion industry exploits garment workers in Bangladesh, tracing the mechanisms of exploitation through wages, working conditions, gender dynamics, and the structural logic of the fast fashion business model. It draws on primary data from worker interviews, secondary data from NGO and trade union reports, and academic literature on global value chains and labour rights.

Part 2 — Research Methodology

Research Design: This study employs a qualitative research design with a descriptive and analytical orientation. A mixed approach is used, combining primary data collection with a systematic review of secondary sources.

Primary Data: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 garment workers in Dhaka’s Ashulia and Gazipur industrial zones — the two largest garment manufacturing clusters in Bangladesh. Workers were recruited through community networks and labour rights organisations to minimise selection bias toward formally organised workers. Interviews were conducted in Bengali by a local researcher and translated by the author.

Secondary Data: Data were collected from the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), the Clean Clothes Campaign, the Worker Rights Consortium, the International Labour Organization (ILO), Oxfam, and academic journals including the Journal of Business Ethics and Global Labour Journal.

Limitations: Access to factory owners and brand representatives was declined in every case approached. The perspective of this study is therefore explicitly from the worker’s side of the labour relationship. All worker names have been anonymised.

Part 3 — Findings and Figures

3.1 Wages and Poverty

The minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh was set at BDT 12,500 per month (approximately USD 114) following the 2023 wage negotiations — the first increase since 2018. Workers and unions had demanded BDT 23,000. At BDT 12,500, the wage sits well below the estimated living wage for Dhaka of BDT 29,000–32,000 per month, calculated to cover housing, food, healthcare, and education for a family of four.

Of the 25 workers interviewed, 22 reported earning the minimum wage or below (including deductions for lateness, “quality failures,” or absenteeism). Only 3 reported earning above minimum wage, all with more than 10 years of service. None reported receiving a bonus in the previous year.

Table 3.1 — Monthly Take-Home Pay vs. Living Costs (Dhaka, 2023)

The data above shows that at the current minimum wage, workers have zero or negative discretionary income once basic needs are met. Remittances — which many workers send to rural families — are effectively impossible to sustain without secondary income or chronic debt.

3.2 Working Hours and Overtime

Bangladesh Labour Law stipulates a maximum of 8 hours per day and 48 hours per week, with overtime capped at 2 hours per day and compensated at 200% of the regular hourly rate. In practice, these protections are routinely violated, particularly in the pre-shipment period.

Of the workers interviewed: 21 of 25 reported regular shifts of 10–14 hours during peak season; 18 of 25 reported being unable to refuse overtime without risk of losing their position; 14 of 25 reported that overtime was not consistently compensated at the legal 200% rate; 7 of 25 reported working through the night before key shipment deadlines.

Table 3.2 — Reported Weekly Hours Worked by Season

3.3 Gender and Exploitation

The feminisation of the Bangladesh garment workforce is not coincidental — it is structurally embedded in the buyer-driven model. Women workers, particularly those migrating from rural areas without urban networks or family support, are considered by factory managers to be more “compliant” and less likely to organise. This perception is both accurate (women face structural barriers to union membership) and self-fulfilling (the industry’s practices reinforce those barriers).

Female workers interviewed reported: verbal abuse from supervisors (18/25); sexual harassment (6/25 disclosed; the actual rate is believed to be significantly higher); denial of maternity benefits (9/15 who had been pregnant while employed); wage deductions for time spent in the toilet exceeding “allocated time” (11/25).

The gender wage gap within factories adds another layer: women in finishing and quality-control roles earn an average of 15–22% less than men in cutting and sewing roles at the same seniority level, despite comparable or greater skill requirements.

3.4 The Fast Fashion Pricing Model

The structural root of garment worker exploitation is the buyer-driven pricing model of fast fashion. Brands such as Zara, H&M, Primark, and Shein place orders with Bangladeshi factories at prices that leave minimal margin for compliance with labour law, building renovation, or wage increases. The pressure is expressed in the industry phrase: “the race to the bottom.”

A shirt that retails for £25 in the UK is purchased from the factory at approximately £2–3. Of that, material costs account for approximately £1.20–1.80, leaving £0.80–1.20 for all factory costs including wages, overhead, management, and profit. At that margin, paying a living wage is structurally impossible without a fundamental change in the purchasing price.

Brands rarely sign long-term contracts, preferring the flexibility of short-term orders that can be cancelled or redirected to cheaper suppliers. This prevents factories from investing in safety improvements, training, or wage increases — all of which require cost certainty over time. Workers bear the financial and physical risk of this structural instability.

Part 4 — Discussion

The exploitation of garment workers in Bangladesh cannot be understood as a failure of individual bad actors — of particularly cruel factory owners or particularly unscrupulous brands. It is a systemic outcome of the global fast fashion value chain as currently constituted. The conditions that enable exploitation — low wages, excessive hours, gender discrimination, unsafe buildings — are not anomalies; they are the cost-reduction strategy.

Post-Rana Plaza reforms have had limited impact on the structural drivers of exploitation. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety — a binding agreement between brands and trade unions — did produce measurable improvements in factory structural integrity, covering approximately 1,600 factories. However, the Accord covers only building and fire safety, not wages or working hours. And it covers only factories in the formal supply chain of signatory brands; the informal subcontracting through which brands outsource production during peak periods remains entirely unregulated.

The discourse of “ethical fashion” and “sustainable supply chains” has generated brand value for companies that market these commitments, but independent auditing consistently finds that conditions in audited factories are better than in non-audited facilities — not because auditing improves conditions, but because brands choose their audited suppliers from a better-performing subset of the overall supply base. The workers most exploited are those who never appear in a brand’s published supplier list.

Trade union organising remains severely constrained in Bangladesh. The 2013 amendment to the Bangladesh Labour Act lowered the threshold for union registration from 30% to 20% of workers, but union leaders continue to face dismissal, physical intimidation, and in some documented cases, violence. The 2023 wage negotiations were accompanied by the arrest of at least 70 union leaders and the dismissal of thousands of workers who participated in strikes.

Part 5 — Conclusion

The exploitation of garment workers in Bangladesh is not an unfortunate side effect of economic development — it is the condition upon which the profitability of global fast fashion rests. Brands earn their margins by externalising the true cost of production onto workers who have no market power to resist. Workers bear wages below the poverty line, working hours that damage health, physical workplaces that can kill, and a legal and political environment that systematically suppresses their ability to organise.

Addressing this requires action at every level of the chain. Brands must commit to purchasing prices that make living wages structurally possible, and to long-term contracts that give factories the planning horizon to invest in compliance. Governments must enforce existing labour law, protect the right to organise, and resist pressure from the industry to suppress wages in the name of competitiveness. Consumers must recognise that the price of a £5 t-shirt is not paid at the till — it is paid by the worker who made it.

Photography and visual media have a specific role to play: making the invisible visible. The garment workers of Bangladesh are among the most important workers in the global economy, yet they are among the least seen. Documentary work that brings their faces, their names, and their conditions into the public sphere is a precondition for the political will to change the system that exploits them.

Part 6 — References

Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA). (2023). Annual Trade Performance Report. Dhaka: BGMEA.
Clean Clothes Campaign. (2022). Unpaid wages, broken promises: The state of garment worker compensation after COVID-19. Amsterdam: CCC.
International Labour Organization (ILO). (2023). Wages and working hours in the textiles, clothing, leather and footwear industries. Geneva: ILO.
Oxfam. (2019). Ripe for change: Ending human suffering in supermarket supply chains. Oxford: Oxfam GB.
Siddiqui, T. (2009). Migration as a livelihood strategy of the poor: The Bangladesh case. Dhaka: Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit.
Worker Rights Consortium. (2021). Hunger in the apparel supply chain: Survey of garment workers in Bangladesh. Washington DC: WRC.
Zaman, R. (2015). The political economy of labour relations in the Bangladesh garment industry. Global Labour Journal, 6(2), 171–188.