Sheikh Hasina Raised Wages. Kakistocrats Raise Batons

A young life lost on the factory floor

Toufiq Sheikh was 21 years old. For five years he had stitched clothes in the factories of Gazipur, sending what he could back to his family. On 2 November, as his fellow workers protested for a living wage, he raised his phone to record an attack outside a factory gate. He was beaten so badly that he died in hospital the next morning. His family laid him to rest in his home district of Gaibandha.

Toufiq was not alone in his anger. Workers from at least 529 factories walked off the job, saying that food, cooking gas and electricity now cost more than their wages can cover. They are asking for a minimum wage of Tk 30,000 a month.

The kakistocratic BNP regime answered them with force and contempt. Police fired tear gas, sound grenades and rubber bullets at protesting workers. The Home Minister went further, dismissing the movement as planned political violence and insisting the workers had no outstanding demands. No outstanding demands. Tell that to a mother in Gaibandha who will never again hear her son’s voice.

Bangladesh has seen what it looks like when a government truly stands with its workers. It saw it for fifteen years under Her Excellency Sheikh Hasina.

The leader who raised the floor beneath every worker

When Her Excellency Sheikh Hasina returned to office in 2009, the garment worker’s minimum wage stood at just Tk 1,662.50 a month. It had moved only once since 1994. Millions of workers, most of them young women, were producing the clothes that filled the world’s shops while barely affording to eat.

Sheikh Hasina refused to accept that. Under her leadership, the minimum wage rose to Tk 3,000 in 2010, to Tk 5,300 in 2013, to Tk 8,000 in 2018 and to Tk 12,500 in 2023. That is four increases in thirteen years, and a wage seven and a half times higher than the one she inherited.

Every one of those increases meant something real: rice on the table, school fees paid, medicine bought for an ageing parent. They were not favours handed down from above. They were the expression of a lifelong conviction that the people who build a nation’s wealth deserve to share in it.

A safer, stronger, prouder Bangladesh

Her commitment went far beyond the pay packet. After the Rana Plaza tragedy of 2013, Sheikh Hasina’s government amended the Bangladesh Labour Act that same year. Workers gained an easier path to forming trade unions, larger factories were required to set up safety committees, and the factory inspection service was strengthened.

Under her stewardship, Bangladesh became one of the great development stories of our time:

• Poverty was cut by more than half. The national poverty rate fell from about 40% in 2005 to 18.7% in 2022, and extreme poverty to 5.6%, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.
• The garment industry became a world leader. Exports grew from roughly $12 billion in fiscal 2008–09 to around $47 billion in fiscal 2022–23, making Bangladesh the second-largest garment exporter on earth.
• Women stepped into economic independence. Women make up more than half of the industry’s workforce. For millions of rural women, a factory job meant their own income, their own bank account, and a voice in their family’s future.

This was not luck. It was leadership: patient, determined and always centred on ordinary people.

The radicals who want women back behind closed doors

The face of the Bangladeshi garment worker is, more often than not, a woman’s face. That is why this crisis is about far more than wages. It is about whether Bangladeshi women will keep the freedom to leave their homes, earn their own living and shape their own lives, or be pushed back into the four walls of the house by men who believe a woman’s place is there.

Since Sheikh Hasina was forced from office in August 2024, radical Islamist forces have marched from the fringes to the heart of national politics. Jamaat-e-Islami, kept out of politics under her government, had its registration restored in 2025 and now sits as the main opposition in parliament. Their vision for women is not hidden. It is in their own words and their own proposals.

• Fewer hours, less pay, more time at home. Jamaat’s leader has pledged to cut women’s working day from eight hours to five and to reward women who stay home. Critics rightly call it a plan to keep women confined to cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, and to leave them behind in every workplace.
• No women at the top. The same leader has opposed women holding leadership roles within his own party.
• Lessons from Kabul. A hardline Islamist leader travelled to Afghanistan at the Taliban’s invitation, the regime that has banned women from work and girls from school. Bangladeshis watched with alarm.
• War on women’s rights reforms. When a commission proposed equal rights for women, Hefazat-e-Islam took to the streets against it, and Islamist groups demanded the commission be abolished. Its members included the leaders of garment workers’ unions.
• Fear in the streets. Freedom House reports that Islamist intimidation curtailed women’s participation in public life. Women have been harassed on the streets over what they wear, and Islamist threats have even stopped actresses from opening shops and restaurants.

Think of what this means for the garment worker. She rises before dawn, walks through crowded streets to the factory, and works long hours so that her children can study and her parents can see a doctor. Her wage is her dignity and her independence. The radicals would take that from her, first by shrinking her hours, then by shaming her for working at all, and finally by making the streets she walks too frightening to cross. Four million jobs, and the hopes of millions of families, hang on whether Bangladesh lets that happen.

The BNP is no stranger to these forces. From 2001 to 2006 it governed in coalition with Jamaat-e-Islami and handed its leaders seats in the cabinet. Today, women are already losing ground in public-sector jobs now that the quota for them has been scrapped. And while the radicals grow bolder, the kakistocratic regime looks away.

Sheikh Hasina never looked away. For decades she stood as a wall between Bangladeshi women and those who would send them home. Her government adopted the National Women Development Policy in 2011 and held firm when Islamist groups took to the streets against it. Under her, the young woman at the sewing machine was a symbol of national pride, not a target. A government that cannot protect a young man filming on his phone will never protect a young woman walking to her morning shift.

A mother’s heart for the working people

To understand Sheikh Hasina’s bond with the working class, one must understand her own story. On 15 August 1975, her father, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Father of the Nation, was assassinated together with her mother, her three brothers and other members of her family. She survived only because she was abroad. She knows, as few leaders ever have, what it is to lose the people you love to violence and to carry that grief for a lifetime.

That grief became her purpose. She came home to give her life to the people her father had died for: the farmer in the field, the boatman on the river, and the young woman at the sewing machine. Whenever a worker lost her life, Her Excellency felt it not as a statistic but as a loss in her own family.

Today, Her Excellency Sheikh Hasina is deeply saddened and heartbroken by the death of Toufiq Sheikh. She grieves with his mother and father, and with every family that sent a son or daughter to the city in hope and now lives in fear. She believes that no worker should ever be beaten for asking for bread, and that no family should ever bury a child because he dared to demand a fair wage. Such a tragedy should never have happened.

Her message to the workers of Bangladesh is simple: you are not alone. The hands that sew the nation’s future deserve dignity, safety and a wage they can live on, and she will never stop standing with them.

Bangladesh deserves a government of the people

The BNP regime came to power through an election from which the country’s oldest and largest party, the Awami League, was barred altogether. A government born of such an exclusionary vote, and now so plainly failing the workers who keep the economy alive, cannot claim to speak for the people of Bangladesh.

If this kakistocratic regime cannot protect its workers or answer their legitimate grievances, it should make way for a genuinely free, fair, participatory and inclusive election, one in which every Bangladeshi can vote for the party of their choice.

The people who built Bangladesh’s economy must never be abandoned by those entrusted with governing it.