Bangladesh news and archive

Bangladesh protests bring production to a halt for Fashion's top brands

Levi's and H&M are among top global clothing brands to suffer production halts in Bangladesh, a garment union leader said Friday, after days of violent protests by workers demanding a near-tripling of their wages. Bangladesh's 3,500 garment factories account for around 85 percent of the South Asian country's 55 billion dollars annual exports,...

Fashion Partner Content

Registration for The IAF’s 37th World Fashion Convention is Open Now

IAF is proud to invite the global apparel industry to its 37th World Fashion Convention that the global industry body is organizing with its Bangladeshi members, BGMEA and BKMEA. Registration for these events has now opened on the joint, dedicated convention website. The Convention will contain a full day conference and a network dinner. The...

Featured

Business|INTERVIEW

Bangladesh: "Our garment industry is one of the safest in the world today"

Faruque Hassan is the new president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Association (BGMEA). The country has been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, and with the looming expiration of the Bangladesh Accord, a new tug-of-war has begun between brands, factories, unions and NGOs over responsibilities and accountability for the health and safety...

Business

Bangladesh’s garment exports to recover pre-Covid levels by October

Garment export might make a full recovery to pre-pandemic levels by October this year as shipments are rebounding with the reopening of Western retail stores. “The trend of garment shipment is good with the rise in demand in the Western world,” said Faruque Hassan, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association...

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Fashion

The Bangladesh safety accord expires in May. What next?

Bangladesh in 2021 remains a garment manufacturing hub for the world’s leading high street and mid-market brands. It is also a region with a well-documented history of factory incidents and unsafe workplaces for its garment workers. After the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, which killed over 1,100 workers, the Accord on Fire and Building...

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Business|BACKGROUND

Sourcing: How the pandemic is affecting global fashion supply chains

The Corona pandemic has hit the apparel industry’s global supply chains hard. How are they recovering? What changes will the pandemic bring? Clothing manufacturers, sourcing platforms and buyers talk about their expectations for the future and whether they believe in the nearshoring trend. Cancellations: premium manufacturers profit In...

BusinessPress Release

Support garment workers affected by Covid-19

The ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh has been particularly hard-hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. USD 1.5 billion of business has already been lost and 1.2 million garment workers’ livelihoods have been impacted. Many factories have been shut down indefinitely and workers were given only 23 days of salary as severance or sometimes none at...

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Fashion

30 percent of global fashion businesses will not survive the crisis

30 percent of the world’s biggest fashion companies, including household name brands and department stores, will not survive the pandemic crisis. The findings come from McKinsey’s updated State of Fashion Report, which said the average market capitalization of apparel, fashion, and luxury players dropped almost 40 percent between the start of...

Retail

Bangladesh commerce minister urges UK government to support suppliers

Bangladesh commerce minister Tipu Munshi has called on the UK government to take action to stop retailers cancelling orders and prevent the potential widespread closure of factories that it could lead to. Bangladesh, which is the world's second largest garment exporter behind China, employs approximately four million workers in around 4,000...

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Business|INTERVIEW

First hand fast-fashion nightmare for Bangladeshi clothing makers

One day Parvin was toiling to meet the fast-fashion demands of European capitals, the next she was among hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi clothes workers made instantly jobless as the coronavirus pandemic struck. Big-name international brands have cancelled billions of dollars in orders because of the pandemic, decimating Bangladesh's most...

Business

Bangladesh unions urge government to protect workers

As Western countries continue to cancel factory orders with stores closed and e-commerce only doing so much to level off money lost from brick-and-mortar, Bangladesh's garment workers are getting let go left and right as the factories they work at continue to lose revenue by the day. To help ameliorate some of the financial struggles these...

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Business|IN DEPTH

Abandoned? The impact of Covid-19 on factories and garment workers

There are few jobs that are as unpredictable and dangerous as that of a garment worker. When things are going well and orders come in, it means time pressure, piecework, verbal and physical abuse at the workplace and still no living wage. When things are not going well, it means cancelled orders leading to job loss, no severance package, no...