DHAKA: Bangladesh garment manufacturers and workers both rejected a proposed new monthly minimum wage of 23 dollars a month on Wednesday following violent protests in May over pay and conditions.

“It’s far lower than our expectations. We hoped the commission would think about the cost of living in the country before fixing this absurd minimum wage,” Nazma Akhter, a garment labour union leader, told AFP.

Rioting workers torched 16 factories and ransacked hundreds of others in May. At least two people were killed and scores injured after security officers fired on demonstrators.

The workers went back to work in mid-June after employers promised to set a new minimum wage.

But employee representatives on Wednesday dismissed the new wage of 1,604 taka (23 dollars) announced late Tuesday by the government’s National Wage Commission.

“We shall not accept this minimum wage. We want the minimum wage to be at least 2,000 taka (29 dollars) or else we will have no option but to launch protests on the streets to realise our demands,” Akhter said.

Employers also rejected the new wage, saying that it would have a devastating impact on the industry.

“Many of the garment factories will have to close if they implement this minimum wage,” said Anisul Haq, a former president of Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association who represented the factory owners at the wage commission.

He said manufacturers would come up with their own figure within a week.

Jafrul Hasan, a member of the National Wage Commission, said the new minimum wage had taken into account the cost of living and the ability of employers to pay.

“The ground realities are that if you raise the minimum wage to a higher level, many of the garment factories will not be able to pay salaries to their workers,” he said.

“We hope both the unions and the factory owners will accept the minimum wage,” he said.

The Bangladesh government fixed a minimum wage of 930 taka (13 dollars) for the sector in 1994 but many factories did not implement it, citing poor profit margins.

Impoverished Bangladesh, which has some 4,200 garment factories, relies on the industry for more than three-quarters of its 10.5 billion-dollar export earnings.

More than two million workers, 85 per cent of whom are women, work in the sector which is notorious for poor salaries and shabby safety standards.

Business, however, has boomed since the end of global textile quotas last year with garment exports in the last fiscal year alone growing by over 24 per cent.—AFP