Bangladesh’s transformation into one of the world’s dominant apparel-exporting nations was built on an enormous, predominantly female workforce and the relentless pursuit of the lowest possible production cost. By the 2010s and 2020s, the ready-made garment sector employed roughly four to five million people, with women forming the majority; the source describes approximately 85% of workers as illiterate women from rural villages and reports about 2.7 million female garment workers in 2024. The industry became the country’s economic engine—accounting for more than 80% of merchandise exports in recent years—but its success rested on wages and operating costs attractive to Western brands seeking an alternative to increasingly expensive Chinese production. A 2011 McKinsey report described Bangladesh as the next major outsourcing destination and emphasized its ability to offer the “lowest price possible,” a logic widely associated with the brutal global race toward the so-called China Price.
The most dangerous feature of this system was subcontracting. Western companies could place orders across layers of factories and intermediaries, demanding that quotas be met while maintaining distance from the workplaces where garments were actually made. The source notes that this separation was attractive to companies because it could obscure responsibility for wage and labor violations. The consequences became impossible to ignore after a series of factory fires and building collapses killed thousands of workers, provoking international criticism of factory safety and buyer oversight. Women were central to the industry’s expansion and gained a route into paid employment and economic independence, yet they were also disproportionately exposed to unsafe buildings, weak labor protections, and inadequate wages. Reforms and green-manufacturing initiatives followed, but the continuing dependence on cheap labor and fragmented contracting left the central ethical question unresolved: who bears responsibility when a global fashion order is profitable for brands but dangerous for the people producing it?
