Readymade garment (RMG) workers yesterday took to the streets, demanding arrears, and vandalised a number of vehicles on the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway at Bhogra in Gazipur.
Sub-Inspector Ekramul Haque of Joydebpur police station said the workers of an RMG factory named Milestone alleged that the authorities had not been paying their salaries regularly.
The workers have been agitating for their salaries of May for the last few days and the authorities then decided to pay 30% of the total salary, he said.
However, disagreeing with the decision, the workers yesterday stopped work around 4:15pm and staged a demonstration. They hurled bricks at the factory units and broke glasses of a few vehicles on the adjacent Dhaka-Mymensingh highway.
When police arrived on the scene they chased the workers to disperse them, but the workers started to hurl bricks on the police, which forced the law enforcers to fire several rounds of rubber bullets and teargas shells, witnesses said. The sporadic clashes caused a long tailback on the highway for around an hour.
Meanwhile, several hundred workers of Sinki Garments in Tongi refrained from work and demonstrated to press home similar demands, said Tongi police station Officer-in-Charge Kazi Ismail Hossain.
The workers were staging the protest as of 7pm.
