The police used rubber bullets after demonstrators, some of whom were armed with bamboo sticks, blockaded roads and forced factories at Gazipur, just outside the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, to close for the day.
"The situation is very volatile. Hundreds of thousands of workers have joined the protests. We fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse them," M. Asaduzzaman, an officer in the police control room, told AFP.
FRANCE 24 correspondent in Bangladesh, David Bergman, said attempts to reach the scene of the disaster were blocked by “protestors concerned about the collapse of the building and the decisions by the manager and the owner of the building to allow the workers in.”
“Clearly there’s an enormous amount of anger among the garment workers,” Bergman said.
Mustafizur Rahman, the deputy police chief of Gazipur, said workers had attacked factories, smashed vehicles, burnt tyres on the roads and tried to torch roadside shops on the sidelines of the rally.
"They are demanding the arrest and execution of the owners of the factories and the collapsed building at Savar," he told AFP.
Meanwhile, the search for survivors from Bangladesh's worst-ever industrial accident stretched into its third day, with the death toll rising to at least 290 after an eight-storey building housing five factories collapsed on Wednesday morning at Savar, a town near Dhaka. Rescuers however expect the toll to rise sharply.
Almost miraculously, 41 people trapped inside the rubble of the building were rescued alive late Thursday, government minister Jahangir Kabir Nanak said, about 40 hours after the disaster.
Nanak said they had been working on the fourth floor of the Rana Plaza building and had all been found trapped in one room. Few other details were available.
Around 2,000 people have been rescued over the past two days, at least half of them injured, but as many as 1,000 people remain unaccounted for.
It is the latest disaster to befall the garment industry in Bangladesh after a fire at a factory making clothing for Walmart and other Western labels in November.
Survivors have said the building developed cracks on Tuesday evening, triggering an evacuation of the roughly 3,000 garment workers employed there, but that they had been ordered back to production lines.
Local television channel Somoy said the protests by workers also spread to several districts in the capital including at Mirpur, home to dozens of garment factories.