Most mornings, 15-year-old Iqbal arrives for his job at a Dhaka panel beaters at about 10am, working on cars for up to 13 hours before he can go home.

The teenager, who earns less than £60 a week, has been working these hours since the age of 12, when his family’s financial problems forced him out of school and into a full-time job.

A major study released on Wednesday suggests his case might be typical of Bangladesh’s poorest young people. A survey of 2,700 slum households (pdf), carried out by the Overseas Development Institute, found that child labourers living in slums worked an average of 64 hours each week – many in supply chains connected to the world’s most popular brands.

The survey, among the largest conducted in the south Asian country, found 15% of children aged between six and 14 did not go to school and worked full-time.

Two-thirds of girls from slum areas who were working full-time were employed in Bangladesh’s $30bn (£24bn) clothes manufacturing industry, which is one of the world’s largest despite an extremely poor safety record.

The manager of one unnamed garment factory told researchers that, while he was aware children aged 11 and 14 should not be working, he did not regard their employment as illegal. He also admitted that many of his employees did not carry identification cards that would verify their age.

There was no immediate comment from Bangladesh authorities or its powerful garment manufacturers, but union leaders said child labour in factories was rampant.

The extent of child labour in Bangladesh’s textile industry was laid bare in July when a nine-year-old boy was brutally killed at one of the largest spinning factories.

Police probing the case said they found a quarter of the workforce at the factory outside Dhaka were children.

International brands have been part of the push to eradicate child labour and improve safety standards in factories since the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse that killed 1,135 people.

But the chief executive of Save the Children, Kevin Watkins, who co-authored the report, said that – given the number of children working in the industry – it was “implausible to believe that there isn’t significant pollution of the value chains of large-scale, western companies”.

“Many of these girls are not in the biggest factories in the formal sector, but they’re certainly in the supply chains of those factories,” he said.

Components of textile manufacturing such as sewing buttons were sometimes contracted out by the large factories to smaller workshops, over which government scrutiny was likely to be poor or non-existent, Watkins said.

“There are very significant levels of child labour in products that end up in retail outlets in the UK and elsewhere.”



The study also found that more than 36% of boys and 34% of girls said they had experienced “extreme fatigue” on the job. It said that families were usually keen for their children to remain in school, but were unable to afford to live without the extra income, albeit meagre.

Iqbal’s father said he was “very much worried and tense” about his son’s future and wished the teenager could continue his education. The boy felt the same way after he first dropped out of school, but said three years in the workforce had changed his perspective.

“Even if I got the chance to study I probably wouldn’t,” Iqbal said. “I have no interest any more.”