1. From Dinajpur to Dhaka ๐
Reshma Begum came from Dinajpur, a rural district in northern Bangladesh roughly 270 kilometers north of Dhaka. At nineteen, she boarded a bus to the capital — the same route taken by countless other village women before her. Bangladesh's garment industry, worth $1.8 million in 1980, had grown into a $25 billion sector by the early 2010s, employing about four million workers. Eighty percent of them were women. Bangladesh fueled this growth by offering ever-cheaper production costs to American and European clothing companies. The price of labor was the industry's core asset, and for poor families in Dinajpur, the bus to Dhaka was effectively the only option.
Reshma worked on the second floor of Rana Plaza in Savar, at Phantom Apparel — also reported in some sources as New Wave Style. Her job was that of a sewing machine operator: seated at a machine, stitching the same seam, over and over.
2. Thirty-Eight Dollars a Month ๐ต
At the time, the legal minimum wage for a Bangladeshi garment worker was 3,000 taka per month — about $38. Pope Francis called it "akin to slave labor." As a junior worker, Reshma's take-home pay was likely close to that figure. The shirts she sewed sold for £20 in London or $30 in New York.
Shifts typically began at 8 a.m. and stretched into the evening; near a deadline, fourteen-hour days were routine. Workers regularly worked fourteen-hour days for a wage that fell well short of any living wage. After rent on a single room in Dhaka's outskirts and basic food, almost nothing was left to send back to Dinajpur. More than 30 percent of Bangladeshi garment workers were paid below even this legal minimum — meaning one in three did not receive even $38.
This price structure was not an accident. ๐ It was the logical product of a long, finely calibrated supply chain — H&M, Walmart, Mango, Benetton, Primark, JC Penney, Joe Fresh on one end, and a 19-year-old woman from Dinajpur on the other. Brands pushed prices down, prices pressed factory owners, and factory owners cut wages and safety. To attract foreign investment, the government drove production costs lower still. A race to the bottom.
3. Eight Floors, Five Factories, Five Thousand Workers ๐ข
Rana Plaza was an eight-story concrete building. Originally permitted as a commercial property, it sat on the site of a filled-in pond. Its owner, Sohel Rana, was a local political figure connected to the youth wing of the ruling party. He added unauthorized floors and installed heavy industrial sewing machines and generators that far exceeded the building's design load.
Inside were five garment factories — Phantom Apparel, New Wave Style, New Wave Bottoms, Ether Tex, and Canton Tech Apparel. The ground floor housed a BRAC Bank branch and shops; the upper floors employed roughly five thousand workers. The labels they stitched bore the names of nearly every fast-fashion brand in the world. Purchase orders, price tags, deadlines — these three things governed five thousand days.
4. April 23: The Cracks ⚠️
On Tuesday, the day before the collapse, deep cracks appeared in the columns and walls of the third floor. The sound of splitting concrete carried to the floors above. Some workers stopped, walked out, and reached the street. Police and industrial police arrived to inspect. The BRAC Bank branch and the ground-floor shops shut down for the day.
The five garment factories did not. That evening, Sohel Rana told reporters the cracks were merely surface plaster damage. Factory managers issued instructions: report to work tomorrow as usual. Anyone who refused would lose a month's wages. To protect that $38, five thousand people would climb those stairs again the next morning. Sohel Rana would later be charged with forcing workers to come in on April 24 despite the visible cracks.
Deadlines were close. The orders had arrived from offices in Europe and North America by email.
5. April 24, 8:57 a.m. ⏰
Wednesday morning, Reshma sat down at her line on the second floor as usual. Soon after work began, the power cut out, and the large diesel generators on the roof started up. Vibration spread through the building. At 8:57 a.m., Rana Plaza fell.
The collapse took less than ninety seconds. The weight of the rooftop generators and eight floors of dead load drove the weakened columns down in sequence. Upper floors folded onto lower ones, and people and sewing machines came to rest together between concrete slabs.
Reshma ran for the stairs as the building began coming down. She ended up in the basement. The full weight of the building came down above her, but she was caught in a wide pocket near the Muslim prayer room — a space that saved her. It was a gap where two slabs had stopped at angles, just large enough to hold one person. Her hair was caught beneath the rubble. She used a sharp object to cut her hair and free herself.
Outside, the rescue had already begun. She had no way of knowing.
6. Seventeen Days ๐ฏ️
For the first few days, Reshma exchanged words with three coworkers trapped in the same pocket. One by one, they fell silent. She gathered crumbs from the lunch bags of the dead. She drank water that had pooled near the prayer room — water thought to have seeped in from fire hoses and rain.
Above her, the unit of time was changing. After the last living survivor — Shahina Akter, on April 28 — died in a fire that broke out during her rescue, the operation shifted from search to recovery. Excavators and bulldozers moved in. By early May, the government had effectively declared the search for survivors over. Bodies came out by the dozen each day.
Reshma could hear the change in the sounds above. Voices were thinning; machines were getting louder. She held a stick and a piece of rebar and struck the wreckage. "For days I could hear the voices of the rescue workers. I kept hitting the wreckage with sticks and iron rods to get their attention." The food ran out first. For the last two days, there was almost no water either.
On the afternoon of May 10, a worker was cutting steel above the rubble. ✨ "Suddenly I saw a silver-colored stick moving through a hole. I looked in and saw someone calling, 'Please save me.'" About forty minutes later, Reshma was pulled out — in a violet outfit and a bright pink scarf, with no major injuries and fully conscious.
It was the seventeenth day. It had been thirteen days since the last living person had emerged. Her rescue was broadcast live across Bangladesh. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina arrived at the hospital by helicopter. Her mother and sister rushed in from Dinajpur. "We got her back just when we had lost all hope of finding her alive," her sister Asma told a broadcaster.
7. The Accounting on Top of the Rubble ๐
The final death toll was 1,134. In industrial accident terms, it was the worst since the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster in India. Of the roughly 2,500 injured, many would live the rest of their lives with amputations or permanent disabilities.
The world responded to the numbers. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, signed by more than 200 mostly European brands, and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, led by American brands, were established in the wake of the collapse. International scrutiny improved working conditions by about 0.80 standard deviations and raised wages by roughly 10 percent. Accord inspections covered around 1,600 factories, and in 2021 the agreement was renewed as an international accord and extended to Pakistan.
But wages moved slowly. Just after the disaster, the government raised the minimum wage from 3,000 to 5,300 taka per month. The next increase came five years later, in 2018, to 8,000 taka (about $95). In November 2023, the government raised it again by 56 percent, to 12,500 taka (about $113) — a figure unions called a "cruel joke." Their demand, 23,000 taka, did not even reach a living wage; the actual increase came in at roughly half that. Brands stayed silent. During that round of protests, four workers were killed by police gunfire.
Compensation was equally inadequate. ๐ฐ Calculated under ILO Convention 121, the total owed to victims came to $30 million — averaging less than $10,000 per death or lifetime disability. Even that sum was raised through voluntary donations, not mandatory contributions, and reaching the target took 26 months. Fifteen brands whose labels were found in the rubble paid nothing at all. Benetton contributed only after a citizen petition gathered more than a million signatures. Walmart gave $1 million. The largest single contributor was Britain's Primark, at $14 million.
Emergency medical care was free, but only that. Survivors living with chronic pain, amputated limbs, damaged spines, and head injuries paid for the rest of their lifelong treatment out of pocket. Six years on, one survivor — already advised to amputate her leg — said she was spending 5,000 taka a month on medication and had sold her house and everything else for treatment. Thirteen years later, many injured survivors still cannot return to work and continue to appear at memorial events demanding compensation and care. As one labor activist put it: what the workers received was not justice but charity.
After Rana Plaza, Bangladesh's share of the global garment market did not shrink. Its share of global clothing exports actually rose, from 4.2 percent in 2010 to 6.4 percent in 2018. The pricing pressure continued, and the same kind of risk persisted in the subcontracting and re-subcontracting chains that fell outside formal inspection.
The owner, Sohel Rana, was arrested four days after fleeing, at the Indian border. He has been sentenced for corruption and for violating construction codes, but the murder trial concerning the deaths of 1,134 people remains unresolved as of 2026, thirteen years on. There are more than forty defendants.
8. The 19-Year-Old from Dinajpur, After ๐
Reshma was hired as a housekeeping staff member at the Westin Dhaka, a five-star hotel — a decision reflecting her own stated wish never to return to a garment factory. She later married and had children.
For several years she appeared at memorial events and gave occasional interviews, but gradually withdrew from public view. The fear of darkness and confined spaces persisted; deep sleep often eluded her. The seventeen days between two slabs of concrete had left her body, but they remained inside her in another form.
The site of Rana Plaza is still an empty lot. A government plan for a memorial park has been delayed for thirteen years, caught in land disputes and budget shortfalls. On one edge of the site stands a small sculpture: two workers holding each other. The base reads "Never Again."
A shirt with the same label is being loaded into a container today, passing through the hands of some other 19-year-old from Dinajpur. The price has already been set.
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