Their factories are still there. Their jobs are not
Mohammad Epon watched his workplace burn down in August 2024.
Thick smoke rose into the sky. Even from his rented house nearby, Epon could tell something was wrong with the air. It felt heavy. Choking.
Inside the Gazi Tyres factory in Rupganj upazila of Narayanganj, there was plenty for the fire to feed on -- rubber, chemicals, whatever could keep the flames going for hours. Firefighters battled the blaze for hours before finally bringing it under control.
What was left barely looked like a factory. The production line where Epon had worked for eight years was down to a skeleton.
But the fire was not the end of it.
Looters started coming almost as soon as the smoke cleared, and they kept coming back for weeks. The looting stretched into the following month.
By then, Epon, originally from the northeast district of Sherpur, had no job. Some days, he told himself it was a bad dream. Maybe he would wake up, and the shifts would still be there, waiting for him.
They were not.
Somewhere in all this, a fear set in that has not really left him. At times, that fear sounded almost like the mob he had heard during the looting: loud, chaotic and closing in.
His life had changed almost overnight. After losing his job at the tyre factory, he worked for a few months at a nearby consumer goods plant to get by. Then he packed up and went home with his family.
These days, he works as a farmer.
Before the fires, Gazi Tyres Ltd, owned by Golam Dastagir Gazi, a cabinet minister of ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, was the country’s biggest tyre manufacturer. Gazi Group’s other factory, at nearby Karnagop, burned in the same way.
Around 7,200 workers from the two plants, most of them from Mymensingh, Sherpur, Madaripur, Barishal and Cumilla, ended up going back to their villages just to survive. And Gazi was not an isolated case.
Before and after the fall of Sheikh Hasina in the July uprising, similar incidents of arson, looting and vandalism were reported at nearly three dozen industrial units across the country. Most of the targeted establishments were owned by businesspeople with political affiliations, according to The Daily Star reports.
For workers, though, the reason often matters less than what comes after.
When protests, political programmes or sudden changes shut down a factory, workers are usually among the first to feel the shock. They have little say in the politics behind the disruption, but their wages, jobs and future plans can disappear all the same.
In the aftermath of the July uprising, workers and the people whose livelihoods depended on them were left facing the same uncertainty around the Gazi factories, Beximco industrial park and Bengal Group premises.
WHEN FACTORIES CLOSE, EVERYONE FEELS IT
Abu Bakar ran a shop at Rupsi Bazar -- near the Gazi Tyres factory -- for more than 10 years.
A large share of his customers were workers like Epon and their families. They came for tea, cigarettes, cakes, bread and the other small things people need every day.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. There was a pulse to it. Workers earned their wages. Bakar sold them what they needed. Then they came back the next day.
After the factory closed, that pulse stopped.
Bakar’s sales fell, but he kept the shop going for several months. About a year ago, he finally gave it up.
Factory shutdowns linked to political programmes, like hartals, do not just stop at the factory gate. Workers lose their incomes. Local shops lose customers. Banks that financed the factories face growing risks when borrowers can no longer repay their loans.
The losses then travel through the economy. Bangladesh has seen this before. Estimates of the daily cost of hartals have run into hundreds of crores of taka.
A 2005 UNDP study estimated that hartals cost the country an average of 3 to 4 percent of GDP a year at the time, including lost earnings, employment and output, as well as longer-term damage.
Amid repeated strikes at the end of 2012 and early 2013, the International Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Bangladesh, said the daily loss due to strikes was $200 million.
More recent research has shown the effect on businesses too.
A 2015 working paper by the International Growth Centre found that seven days of hartal reduced a firm’s export performance by 4.5 percent. Smaller exporters and those selling lower-priced, generic products were hit harder, while firms also turned more to airlifting for export deliveries.
BANGLADESH HAS BEEN HERE BEFORE
Political disruption is hardly new in Bangladesh. Since independence in 1971, political battles have repeatedly spilt onto the streets. Hartals and blockades have stopped factories, emptied markets and disrupted trade.
Journalist Ajoy Dasgupta traced that history in his book “Sat Dashaker Hartal O Bangladesher Rajniti” (Hartal over the Seven Decades and Politics of Bangladesh), published in 2018.
Between 1972 and 2017, he wrote in the book, a total of 563 countrywide and 1,577 regional hartals were enforced by political parties.
Political parties or alliances call national strikes mainly to achieve political goals, but it is recognised that they cause damage to the economy, Ajoy wrote.
The exact tally is less important than the pattern -- governments change, political movements change, but the economic shock often falls on the same people.
After the fall of the military regime in 1990, democracy returned. The hartal, however, did not disappear.
Instead, political parties continued to use strikes and blockades as a way to put pressure on governments, with workers and businesses caught in the middle.
The history matters because it puts the latest disruption in context. What happened in 2024 was not happening in a vacuum.
THE DAMAGE GOES BEYOND WORKERS
Bengal Group of Industries is another example of what happened to some businesses after the 2024 uprising.
Three of Bengal factories near Bangladesh Krira Shikkha Protishtan (BKSP) in Savar were set on fire on August 4, 2024. The facilities employed about 3,000 workers and suffered losses of more than Tk 1,000 crore, said Bengal Group Vice-Chairman Md Jashim Uddin.
The three affected units had bank liabilities of around Tk 350 crore. Once those loans became non-performing, Bengal Group’s overall credit profile deteriorated, making it harder for other businesses within the group to open letters of credit (LCs) to import raw materials.
“We have around 26 factories. If one unit becomes a defaulter, the whole group faces restrictions,” Jashim said.
The experience of Beximco shows another way industrial disruption can turn into a wider economic loss.
In December 2024, the group laid off nearly 40,000 workers across its 15 apparel units, citing a lack of work orders for its export-oriented garment and textile factories on the outskirts of Gazipur.
Beximco Managing Director Osman Kaiser Chowdhury said its industrial park was attacked after August 5, 2024, with factories set on fire and raw materials and finished goods worth around Tk 800 crore destroyed.
Salman F Rahman, the vice-chairman of the group, was the private sector adviser to Sheikh Hasina. The group could not reopen most of its units because of funding constraints, as banks stopped financing it amid mounting defaulted loans.
Beximco owed nearly Tk 50,000 crore in bank loans.
Kaiser said restarting operations would have allowed the company to generate export proceeds and repay loans owed to state-owned banks.
That is the problem with a factory shutdown. Machines can survive a fire. Buildings can be repaired. But without the money to restart, none of it means much.
“The machines are there. The factories are there,” Kaiser said. “What we need is working capital and banking support. Without that, restarting production is impossible.”
The situation at Gazi Group remains unresolved as well.
A top official at the group, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the group wants to restart the factories, but several complications, including issues related to insurance, are yet to be resolved.
The group used to meet around 40 percent of the country’s demand for tyres before the closure. The series of attacks and arson in 2024 caused losses of around Tk 2,000 crore at its two industrial blocks in Rupganj.
The group is seeking to rebuild and resume operations. The official said that it has received assurances of policy support from the government.
“As our banking transactions had also been in good standing in the past, the banks are cooperating with us. We are trying to rebuild and get back on our feet,” he said.
THE WAIT STILL GOES ON
Bangladesh is not the first place where politics has spilled into the workplace.
In Poland, a strike at the Gdansk shipyard in 1980 grew into a nationwide labour movement. In Egypt, the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 was followed by a wave of strikes as workers pushed for better pay and conditions. Hong Kong saw months of protests in 2019, disrupting shops, transport and businesses across the city.
Then there was Chile. Protests that began over a rise in public transport fares grew into a much bigger crisis, shutting businesses and disrupting everyday work. Lebanon faced something similar that year. Banks closed, businesses struggled to move money, and workers found themselves caught in an economic shock they had little control over.
Myanmar showed just how ugly the fallout could become. After the military takeover in 2021, protests, strikes and the collapse of economic activity wiped out millions of jobs.
Different countries. Different politics. Different streets. But there was one familiar part. When the streets turn chaotic, the people on the payroll often feel it first.
The income stops, the shift vanishes, and suddenly a family that was getting by has to figure out how to get through next week.
Take the example of Rahmat Ali, who is still waiting for his turn to go back through that factory gate. On a Wednesday afternoon, he stood outside the factory compound in Rupganj, peering through the closed main gate.
He could not go in.
After the factories closed, he was compelled to return to his village home in Shariatpur.
“I often came to see whether the factory had reopened. If it does, I want to work here again,” Rahmat said.
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