Thu, 6 Sep 2012

Clothing retailer H&M’s chief executive Karl-Johan Persson used a meeting with Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina to ask for an increased minimum wage for textile industry workers.

Persson also requested that industry workers have an annual wage review. Since the minimum wage for textile workers was first set in 1994, it has only been revised twice, in 2006 and 2010.

H&M has been buying from suppliers in Bangladesh since 1982, but does not own any factories in the country, and therefore makes no decisions about workers’ wages. The firm also opened a production office in the country in 1983.

According to a 2008 story from the website of magazine Forbes, Bangladesh had the world’s seventh-largest gross exports of textiles and apparel to the US, worth $3.2bn (£2bn), with China the largest, at $35bn.