A new report from JusticeMakers Bangladesh in France counts 457 garment factory closures and more than 240,000 lost jobs since August 2024, in an industry whose jobs are underpaid and often unsafe and, for millions of workers, impossible to replace.
A new report released by the rights group JusticeMakers Bangladesh in France counts 457 garment and textile factories in Bangladesh that ceased operations between August 2024 and June 2026, leaving more than 240,000 workers unemployed. In the first half of 2026 alone, 20,783 workers lost their jobs across 80 factories. The report, titled “Threads Under Pressure,” warns of a grave and widening labor-rights crisis in the industry that clothes much of Europe and North America. The rights group tracks labor and human-rights abuses in the country, and compiled the figures from closures across the sector.
The report documents “persistent patterns of delayed and unpaid wages, mass layoffs, factory closures, suppression of peaceful labour protests, excessive use of force by law enforcement agencies, unsafe working conditions, inadequate occupational health and sanitation facilities, and weak enforcement of labour protections,” according to a summary by The Shillong Times. Tthe findings sketch a workforce absorbing the shock of a shrinking industry with little cushion beneath it.
Why Bangladesh’s garment factories are closing
The closures land on a sector that had already been through a wrenching two years. In the summer of 2024, student-led protests against a government job-quota system escalated into a national uprising, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country in 2024, ending a tenure that had run since 2009. An interim government led by the Nobel laureate economist Muhammad Yunus took over, promising reforms before new elections. The political rupture, combined with soft global orders and rising costs, is the backdrop against which hundreds of factories have gone dark. Unpaid wages and withheld severance recur throughout the report’s findings, the costs that fall on workers first when a factory shuts without warning.
The workers caught in the middle were already stretched. Bangladesh set its monthly minimum wage for garment workers at 12,500 taka, about $113, after protests in 2023, well below the 23,000 taka (roughly $208), that unions had demanded. Those 2023 wage protests were met with force, with several workers killed and thousands facing arrest, and the legal cases that followed hung over the workforce as the factories began to close.
Where the brands fit in
The report puts the question of responsibility back on the companies whose clothes are sewn in these factories, and labor advocates have been pressing that point since the wage crackdown. “The systematic punishment of workers for speaking out against a poverty wage cannot be separated from brands’ unwillingness to use their leverage to protect the rights of workers in their supply chains,” Thulsi Narayanasamy, director of international advocacy at the Worker Rights Consortium, said in 2024, as pressure mounted over the arrests. “We have gathered harrowing testimony from workers and union leaders impacted by violence and horrifying weeks in jail and all of this is connected to supply chains of international brands.”
Others framed brand silence itself as a choice. Anna Bryher, policy lead at Labour Behind the Label, says both the silence of the brands on these issues and their slowness to respond “amounts to complicity in human rights violations.”
“Where are the brands in making sure that suppliers drop the blanket legal charges against workers who protested against poverty pay,” Bryher asked. “Repression is predictable, and it shouldn’t take rights groups having to fight for these vile legal cases to be dropped, for brands and the ETI to take notice and start work.” The brands sourcing from Bangladesh are among the largest names in fashion, including H&M, Zara, Next, Gap, and C&A, which is why factory closures and unpaid workers there are not a distant problem but a supply-chain one.
What’s at stake for a country built on clothes
Few economies are as tied to a single industry as Bangladesh is to garments. The textile and clothing sector accounts for more than 80 percent of the country’s export earnings and employs roughly 4 million workers, a majority of them women, across some 4,000 to 4,500 factories, according to the labor-rights organization FEMNET. That concentration is what makes a wave of closures so destabilizing: a job lost in a Dhaka garment factory is rarely replaced by another kind of work, and severance and back wages are often the first things to disappear when a factory shuts.
The jobs at the center of it are hard ones, paying below what unions and living-wage researchers say a worker needs, with long hours and protests over both that have been met with force. For a workforce that is mostly women with few other formal options, they are also the difference between a wage and nothing. The demand from labor advocates has not been for brands to pull out, which would only speed the losses, but for them to use their leverage to make the jobs survivable and to see that workers are paid what they are owed when a factory does close.
The report’s authors argue that the crisis is a test of whether the accountability structures built after past disasters actually hold when the industry contracts rather than grows. More than a decade after the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse killed more than 1,100 garment workers and forced the world to reckon with who is responsible for the people who sew its clothes, the same question is being asked again, now about factories closing rather than falling. For the brands that built their supply chains on the country’s cheap, skilled labor, the report is a reminder that the responsibility does not end when the orders slow. For the workers in those factories, the jobs are grueling and underpaid, and right now they are disappearing faster than anything is arriving to take their place. “All of this is connected to supply chains of international brands,” Narayanasamy said.
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