Thousands of Bangladeshi workers demonstrated on Sunday to demand unpaid wages as some factories resumed limited-scale operations amid a nationwide virus lockdown, police said.
Workers from at least 10 factories erected barricades on a major highway near Dhaka, asking for unpaid wages for the month of March, Siddiqur Rahman, district unit chief of the industrial police, said.
Workers from at least 286 of 2,072 factories in Gazipur district, which lies near the capital, remain unpaid, he said, adding that police were struggling to manage the protesters.
Protests also flared up in the neighbouring Ashulia Industrial area, where a factory fired more than 700 workers on Saturday, said Bangladesh Garment Workers’ Solidarity leader Taslima Akhter.
But police convinced more than 400 workers who took to the streets in Dhaka’s Rampura neighbourhood to go home after factory owners promised arrears would be paid.
The factory owners’ association, BGMEA, which earlier claimed most of the workers were paid for the month of March, said operations at several hundred factories began amid the lockdown, in line with a government decision.
Workers, wearing masks and hand gloves, got their temperature checked before they entered the factories, the association said. Production floors were disinfected and steps were taken to keep employees a safe distance from one another.
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Bangladesh, the second-largest apparel producer worldwide after China, imposed the shutdown in late March amid the outbreak of novel coronavirus, which infected nearly 5,500 people and killed 145.
More than 4 million workers are employed in 4,000 factories in Bangladesh, earning nearly 34 billion dollars a year from garment exports, mostly to Europe and America. (dpa)
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