These complaints were seconded by angry residents of the city's Capitol Hill district, where police pursued protesters with tear gas and concussion grenades despite the fact that the area was outside the no-protest zone.
Were it not for the heavily armed police presence that have turned the ExCel Centre into a protest-free zone, the day's gathering could easily be mistaken for a conference of executive junior managers.
Elsewhere, many thousands of workers from the hundreds of garment factories across the Savar industrial zone and other nearby industrial areas took to the streets to protest the collapse and poor safety standards.