Political protests in the form of strikes are still quite common in the former Indian subcontinent countries, locally known as hartals. Such a form of protest is associated with a mass movement of total shutdown of economic activities and closure of educational institutes, which often results in coercion, violence and damage of public and private properties. Proponents of hartals claim this form of political protest as their rights to “freedom of expression” and “freedom of assembly”; however, exercising such a form of freedom comes at a cost to the nation and to the economy. Utilizing the World Bank enterprise survey data of 2007 and 2013 of Bangladesh, this paper is one of the first attempts to systematically examine the impact of hartal on firms. We find that the factor neutral effect of strikes is strongly positive which significantly increases the cost of production. Moreover, we report strong evidence of substantial productivity loss by firms during the events of multiple hartals in a week. As a coping strategy, we found that firms re-optimize in response to political strikes, by significantly substituting among factors inputs, mostly by reducing expenditure on wages and capital consumptions to offset the effect of higher material costs due to hartals. Among the industries, we found evidence of heterogeneous impacts of hartal, where the effect is much pronounced for garments, leather, machinery and equipment, manufacturing and service industries. Our results show that small firms suffer the most due to hartal as it is difficult for them to re-optimize the factors to reduce the cost in the short-run. On the whole, we show evidence that political strikes lead to a substantial productivity loss which cannot be mitigated by well-known coping strategies employed by the firms in Bangladesh.