“We became adults very early inside the garment factories.”

 Interview

Author: Nandita Shivakumar

Date: June 15, 2026

Over four decades, Green Bangla Garments Workers Federation President Sultana Begum has lived Bangladesh’s garment industry from every angle: as a child labourer who stitched to keep her family afloat after a childhood marked by deep poverty; as a grassroots organiser whose union work cost her factory jobs; and today, as a trade union leader representing more than 64,000 workers across Bangladesh’s export-oriented garment supply chains.

Her journey closely mirrors the transformation of the industry itself – the rapid expansion of factories and women’s employment in the 1980s, the emergence of labour organising against extremely low wages and unsafe working conditions, the painful realities exposed by the Rana Plaza collapse, and the struggles that continue today over wages, safety, and women’s leadership within the labour movement.

In this conversation with Nandita Shivakumar, Sultana reflects on that journey – the possibilities and challenges garment workers face, the pressures women trade union leaders navigate within a deeply conservative and patriarchal society, and her hopes for a new generation of women organisers.

Question. You started working in the garment industry as a child, while growing up in very difficult circumstances. Can you tell us about that period of your life – what pushed you into factory work, and what your early experiences were like?

Sultana: I was born in 1977 in Dhopaitail, a remote village in Jamalpur District, in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh Division. My father died before I was born. We were six siblings, three sisters and three brothers, and after his death, my mother struggled to feed us and keep the household running.

We had no land or property, and because my mother was my father’s second wife, much of the family property had gone to his first wife’s family. There were many days when we genuinely worried about whether we would have enough food to survive.

Then in 1988, severe flooding hit our village and whatever little stability we had disappeared. I was around 11 years old, and I had to start working to support myself. The garment factories in the city were one of the only places where a poor village girl could get regular work, so I joined a factory in Mirpur, Dhaka.

The conditions were very difficult. We worked 12 to 14 hours a day, sometimes even longer, often without overtime wages. At that age I had no understanding of labour rights – I simply did whatever management told us to do.

I remember going to work wearing a simple sleeveless frock, without slippers, because I could not afford them. At that time, young girls and women working in garment factories were heavily looked down upon simply because we worked outside the home. Men and women working together inside factories for long hours, sometimes late into the night, was still socially unacceptable to many people.

Q: Despite all of this, you enrolled back in school during this period. What was it like trying to study while working in the factory?

Sultana: Once I started earning and saving a little money, I realised I had some freedom for the first time – in the sense that I might be able to pay for my own education. So I enrolled in school again while continuing factory work.

Managing factory work and studies as a young girl living in a small room in Dhaka with my sisters was extremely difficult. Factories rarely gave enough leave, so sometimes I could not attend exams I had studied very hard for and had to take them six months later instead.

In those days, there were no mobile phones or internet available to us. Sometimes factories would not even allow us leave to go and check our exam results. Many times, I would only learn weeks later whether I had passed.

Looking back now, I feel many of us became adults very early inside the garment factories. We had to grow up very quickly within those factory walls.

Q: What experiences pushed you toward the trade union movement, and what did organising mean to you at that time as a young garment worker?

Sultana: After around two years in the factory, I slowly began to realise the extreme level of wage theft happening to me and my co-workers. Technically, if we were supposed to work nine hours, in reality we were often working 14 to 16 hours a day. I would leave for the factory on foot at around 7 AM and only return home at around midnight. We did not even have enough money for a rickshaw or bus.

At that time, even losing one or two dollars in overtime was a huge loss. Whether I could afford vegetables for meals or pay school fees for that month often depended on that missing money.

When I was around 15, in the industrial area where my factory was located, I met some young labour organisers speaking to workers like us about our right to access trade unions and the protections that already existed in law. I immediately became interested, because I desperately wanted to receive my full wages, and I joined the labour movement. 

At that age, I did not understand trade unions in an ideological way. For me, workers simply wanted to receive the wages and bonuses they had earned, and to be treated like human beings. Trade unions were the only groups speaking seriously about those issues.

Through the union, I slowly began learning about labour rights – maternity rights for women workers, how overtime should be calculated, how much leave we were legally entitled to, the bonuses workers should receive. I recognised how almost all of our rights were being violated.

That knowledge made me angry, but it also empowered me. I began arguing with our factory management using what I had learned and helping other women workers, especially young girls like me, claim their overtime, access leave, stand up against verbal abuse, and demand their legal rights. We began to build solidarity with each other.

Over time, the factory management began seeing me as a problem. After several years of organising inside Dhaka’s garment industry, I eventually lost my job and became known in the industry as a “troublemaker.” 

By then, the trade union movement had become deeply important to me, and in 1997 I decided to become a full-time organiser outside the factory.

Question: Bangladesh’s labour movement, like its wider society, has its own entrenched power structures. What was it like entering that movement as a young woman?

Sultana: Bangladesh is a deeply conservative and patriarchal society, and the trade union movement largely reflected those same structures when I entered it as a young woman. Even though women made up the majority of garment workers, leadership and key decisions in garment labour unions were controlled by men. Women were expected to mobilise, protest, and do the hard groundwork, but strategy, negotiations, decision-making, and leadership spaces belonged to male leaders. And in many ways, this still continues.

That made me feel very vulnerable. You depended heavily on senior men because they had more experience dealing with companies and officials, but many were unwilling to support women growing independently. Factory owners also often dismissed us outright: "You are just an uneducated woman, what do you know?"

Question: You’ve spoken openly about the harassment and attacks on your character that followed, particularly after Rana Plaza collapse. What was that period like and how did you continue through it?

Sultana: Things became especially difficult for me after Rana Plaza collapse, when international attention on Bangladesh’s garment industry suddenly intensified. Because I was active on the ground – speaking with journalists, researchers, and foreign delegations – my visibility created jealousy and hostility from some male leaders within the movement itself. One began spreading rumours that I was a sex worker, and publicly shared my phone number. I started receiving calls from unknown men at all hours. 

The harassment was emotionally overwhelming and deeply affected my personal life. My husband grew distrustful and pressured me to quit organising. By then, I had supported more than 20,000 women workers on wages, workplace abuse, and social security. I could not walk away from this work. So I decided to continue – and my husband left because of that choice. I raised my two daughters alone, earning very little. 

I also want to be careful in how I speak about this. I do not want to give the impression that all men within the labour movement were against women’s leadership. A few genuinely stood beside me during those difficult years, and later supported the building of Green Bangla. 

That experience taught me that real solidarity is possible – but only when people are genuinely willing to challenge the oppressive structures we carry within ourselves: patriarchy, capitalism, and hierarchy in all their forms. That is the kind of thinking I believe is always needed.

Q: After Rana Plaza, global brands, NGOs, journalists, and international actors became much more engaged with Bangladesh’s garment sector. From your perspective, what changed for workers in that period?

Sultana: One important change was around freedom of association. Before the Rana Plaza collapse, it was extremely difficult to register trade unions. Afterwards, there was much greater international pressure on the government and factory owners to allow union registration, and many workers became less afraid to speak about their workplace problems.

More women workers also slowly began participating in labour organising spaces.

This is not to discount the fact that violence and intimidation against organisers still continue in certain pockets of the industry, and that we have seen the growth of management-controlled or “yellow” unions, which in some cases have been used to weaken or divide legitimate worker organising.

Factory infrastructure and fire safety also improved in many larger factories because of international scrutiny and initiatives like the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry. Child labour also reduced significantly in many export factories.

But many of the deeper problems remain. The industry has become extremely unstable, especially after COVID-19 and more recently with US-imposed tariffs. During these periods of instability, workers suffer the most, through layoffs, wage theft, rising workloads, and job insecurity.

When inflation rises while wages remain low, workers are pushed back into survival conditions very quickly, sometimes even reducing meals or giving up small things, like buying a chocolate for their child once a week.

Unless global supply chains change structurally, it is very difficult to fully solve these problems. I believe that when brands profit, workers should meaningfully share in that value, not only shareholders. The real question is how to build legal, political, and economic systems that can actually make that redistribution of power and value possible, and whether brands truly have the willingness to allow it.

Q: Looking ahead, what are your hopes for women in the trade union movement, especially younger women organisers entering this space today? What kind of leadership, and what kind of movement, do you hope the next generation will build?

Sultana: Compared to my generation, many young women organisers today have far greater access to education, mobile phones, and social media. And because of that, they are often much more aware of their rights. They are very smart.

Some now translate documents from Bangla to English using apps, photograph violations with timestamps, and teach workers about their rights through social media. They are finding entirely new ways to connect with women workers through digital spaces – something that simply did not exist in my time.

But many of the same pressures remain. Women organisers are still expected to balance marriage, household responsibilities, childcare, and union work, often with very little support. Very few men genuinely support women continuing this work after marriage.

Because in the end, a movement that fights exploitation outside but tolerates inequality within its own walls is not the movement we need. I hope the next generation has both the tools and the political understanding to recognise those contradictions and to fight to change them.

We are grateful to Amrin Hossain Aney, a young leader of Green Bangla Garments Workers Federation, who made this conversation with Sultana Begum possible and translated the interview from Bangla to English.