Wages not
warrants:
stop the crackdown
40,000 workers in Bangladesh remain at risk of arrest due to baseless criminal cases filed by factory owners during the 2023 wage demonstration
In November 2023, during the national wage-revision process, thousands of Bangladeshi garment workers took to the streets to call for an end to poverty wages in largely peaceful protests.
Workers were met with an unprecedented level of repression and police violence – four workers lost their lives, 131 people were arrested, and approximately 40,000 people are still facing charges simply because they exercised their legal right to organise and demand dignified pay.
Unions and worker organisers say this has had a huge impact on the climate for union organising in Bangladesh, due to the risk that blank arrest warrants could be used against any workers who raise concerns with factory bosses, as a tool for settling personal or political grievances.
Is your favourite brand responsible for the violent repression of Bangladeshi garment workers?
What have the brands said and done?
We have been working with others in the Clean Clothes Campaign to link 45 fashion brands to suppliers who filed charges in 36 cases against garment workers in Bangladesh, and have been pushing these brands to ensure the cases are dropped for the past year. While some brands have taken initial steps to ensure suppliers drop false allegations, a year on, all brands and suppliers have failed to follow through and not a single case has been cleared.
It is important also to put this failure in context of other things the brands did not do, that caused this repression to start. The failure of international brands to publicly condemn the undemocratic wage revision process and include wage demands supported by Bangladeshi trade unions resulted in the predictable cycle of failed wage revision outcomes, which escalated into violence and repression directed at malnourished and desperate workers. The new minimum wage of 12,500 BDT ($106) per month that was annouced last autumn and saw workers take to the streets is among the lowest in the world and far below the trade union demand of 23,000 BDT ($195), a wage that research studies confirm is the minimum required to place workers above the poverty line.
Despite brands making public statements promising to support a fair and independent wage-setting process and to protect the workers’ right to unionise and protest, fashion brands failed to do their due diligence and take any meaningful action to foster an environment where workers’ voices were included in the wage debate, or ensure that speaking up does not cost workers their freedom or lives.
Brands’ endless promises about living wages and freedom of association were shown to be nothing but lip service and an attempt to deflect from the effective outsourcing of worker repression to the Bangladeshi security forces and employer-aligned institutions.
What can we do to help stop this?
For the last year, Labour Behind the Label have been joining partners from Bangladesh and Europe in writing to brands to push for them to get their suppliers to drop the charges. We hosted a demo (see video below) in London in April calling on brands to also intervene. We are now launching a campaign in partnership with Clean Clothes Campaign our international network to push brands to act. You can call on NEXT, Matalan and M&S to take action today!
Workers in Bangladesh demanding fair pay
Is your favourite brand responsible for the violent repression of Bangladeshi garment workers?
The brand tracker below lists brands complicit in the repression and outlines the actions they are yet to take to end the repression against workers in their supplier factories.