"'I thought about killing my children': the desperate Bangladesh garment workers fighting for pay", 10 December 2020

... “We were just protesting peacefully against the grave injustice we are facing. We didn’t block roads, we didn’t chant slogans or create chaos” says Ashraf Ali, a former worker at A-One BD Ltd... “Yet... police came with a water cannon truck and baton charged us as we slept. We were shocked by how sudden it was. Around 30 workers were beaten by police. We didn’t deserve this.”...

Tahmina Azad joined the protest when it began last week. A year ago she was working as a machine operator at A-One (BD) Ltd and supporting her young family. Now she, along with thousands of others, is jobless and destitute. Azad joined the protest because she didn’t know what else to do. She is the sole breadwinner for her family of six and is surviving on the charity of her neighbours. She hasn’t been able to pay her rent for the past 10 months and has racked up huge credit lines at all her local grocery stores.

“Once, for two straight days, I had nothing to cook for my children,” she says. “ I thought of killing myself, I thought of killing my children and setting them free from this torture. When my neighbours got a sense of my dire situation, they fed my children. I’m only alive because of their generosity,” she says...