Bangladesh garment workers earn $113/month minimum wage -- 63% below the $302 living wage -- while producing 84% of the country's exports

Bangladesh's 4 million garment workers, over 80% of whom are women, produce clothing for major global brands while earning a minimum wage of $113 per month (12,500 BDT), raised 56% in late 2023 but still far below the $302 monthly living wage calculated by the Institute of Labour Studies in Bangladesh. Thirty percent of workers earn below even this minimum, and women earn an average of $18 less per month than male counterparts despite working longer hours. Why it matters: the gap between minimum wage and living wage means garment workers cannot afford adequate nutrition, healthcare, or education for their children, so families remain trapped in intergenerational poverty despite full-time employment, so workers who attempt to unionize face systematic retaliation -- Amnesty International documented widespread anti-union abuse across the garment industry in 2025 -- so the power imbalance between brands and workers is self-reinforcing, so global fashion brands capture the margin between $5 production cost and $50-100 retail price while the humans making the clothes remain impoverished. The structural root cause is that global fashion brands use competitive bidding among supplier countries (Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia) to drive manufacturing prices below the cost of dignified labor, and the 2023 Al Jazeera investigation found brands routinely paid Bangladeshi factories less than production cost, forcing factory owners to squeeze workers rather than lose contracts.