How Bangladesh’s Garment Suppliers Are Being ‘Squeezed Dry’

Faisal Samad knows wherefore planetary manner brands support coming backmost to Bangladesh.

As manager of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers & Exporters Association, helium sees the entreaty up close: its monolithic scale, a increasing web of LEED-certified “green” factories and a estimation arsenic a comparatively harmless stake aft rigorous information reforms successful the aftermath of the Rana Plaza collapse.

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But the existent draw, Samad said, is adjacent simpler. Bangladesh is cheap—and that, helium argues, has agelong travel astatine suppliers’ expense.

“Despite Bangladesh evolving implicit the past 40 years, the buyers’ attack is inactive each astir margins,” helium said. “And I deliberation that communicative needs to change.”

Samad, managing manager of Surma Garments, a knitwear shaper extracurricular Dhaka, wasn’t amazed by a caller study from Public Eye, a Swiss watchdog group, and the Clean Clothes Campaign, a conjugation of commercialized unions and civilian nine groups.

Using semipermanent planetary commercialized information alongside company-specific figures from retail giants specified arsenic Bestseller, Uniqlo purchaser Fast Retailing, H&M Group, Primark and Zara proprietor Inditex, the 2 organizations recovered that portion nominal prices person edged up successful Bangladesh, brands are paying 30 percent little successful existent presumption for a fabric T-shirt than they did 25 years ago—even aft adjusting for European inflation.

It’s a fig that’s hard to ignore: More than 61 percent of fabric T-shirts imported into the EU are made successful Bangladesh for astir $2 to $3 apiece, though immoderate merchantability for little than $1.

In 2025, the mean EU import terms stood astatine lone $16 per kilogram, portion sourcing prices from Bangladesh, the main supplier to the bloc, were astir $13 per kilogram. Since a elemental T-shirt connected the precocious thoroughfare tin outgo betwixt $12 and $20, a azygous T-shirt sold astatine retail tin bring successful capable gross for a large marque to bargain astir a kilogram of them astatine factory-floor prices.

David Hachfeld, a researcher astatine Public Eye and 1 of the report’s co-authors, said that this “sustained erosion” of sourcing worth hurts supplier stability, lowers wages and casts superior uncertainty connected the industry’s ethical and sustainability promises.

“A modulation towards a conscionable and sustainable manner strategy based connected $2 shirts and different dirt-cheap covering is impossible,” helium said. “Just ideate however overmuch enactment and worldly is involved, however accelerated the accumulation indispensable beryllium and however squeezed prices are.”

He said brands often acceptable a retail terms archetypal and enactment backward from there, pushing suppliers to conscionable a sourcing outgo that has small to bash with what it really costs to marque the product.