Heat Check: Searing Temps Lead to Unsafe Working Conditions in the Global South
Dy phors spends her days packing orders destined for international brands at a garment factory in Krong Bavet, a Cambodian city near the country’s border with Vietnam. With a limited number of fans to cool the warehouses, the 29-year-old often works under sweltering conditions, particularly between March and June, when temperatures can easily soar past 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). The humidity can often make it feel orders of magnitude more oppressive—even impossible to function.
“This causes our workers to fall sick more frequently and take frequent leaves of absence,” she said through a translator. Headaches, dizziness, cramps and fatigue are common symptoms of overheating and dehydration. Left unaddressed, they can result in organ failure and, in extreme cases, death.
More from Sourcing Journal
While the global South, where the vast majority of clothing and footwear production takes place, has always been known for its blistering climes, human-driven climate change is causing a spike in heatwaves that are baking vast swathes of the planet for longer periods. 2023 was the hottest year on record with 26 more days of extreme heat than there would have been typically, according to researchers from Climate Central, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and World Weather Attribution. Countries nearest the equator saw the biggest increases in extreme heat, with the mercury regularly shooting past the triple digits.
2024 is shaping up to be another numbers buster. This past April saw more record-shattering temperatures across South and Southeast Asia, shutting down schools, obliterating crops and killing hundreds of people through heat-related illnesses. Ko Barrett, deputy secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said in the same month that heat is “becoming the silent killer,” causing a scale of premature deaths and economic costs, including reduced labor productivity, that is not “being accurately reflected in the statistics.”
Workers in Bangladesh’s factories are sweating all the time, said Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Workers Solidarity, a workers’ rights group, and a former garment worker herself. And even when they’re not, fatigue and weakness are common complaints. While the world’s second-largest exporter of clothing after China often touts its high number of LEED-certified “green” factories, most feature outdated design and construction that is ill-equipped to meet the new climate reality. Air conditioning is uncommon, if not an outright luxury, as is ready access to clean, potable water. And even more modern setups might struggle, she said, recounting a visit to one of these facilities on a day where the temperature was “bearable” outside and large, adjustable fans were whirring away within despite the country’s notoriously unreliable power grid. It still felt like a furnace.
“Because the inside is so crowded and you have all these machines and human bodies,” she said. “I asked a manager what they did when there’s a huge heatwave and he said they sprinkle water outside, and I asked how is that helping workers at all. He didn’t have an answer.”
Keeping conditions comfortable for workers in a sprawling factory space isn’t easy, nor cheap, said Md. Fazlul Hoque, managing director of Plummy Fashions, a “green” knitwear factory in Narayanganj, an hour’s drive south of Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka. Plummy Fashions has installed one of the country’s largest solar plants, but older factories that rely on conventional sources of electricity have to grapple with the ballooning emissions they create at a time when the industry is desperately trying to slash them.
Beating the heat can be a Herculean task when it’s positively searing, too. Factories can only lower internal temperatures by a handful of degrees, which isn’t saying much when it’s a broiling 46 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Fahrenheit) outside, said Naurin Muzaffar, strategic advisor of sustainability at Crescent Bahuman, a vertically integrated denim manufacturer in Pakistan. Outside of working hours, employees who live on the premises need cool accommodations, which adds to the company’s operating expenses. Overheating machinery can also pose a fire hazard.
“You don’t find many spaces where adaptation is being discussed,” she said. “It’s more about how do you reduce your emissions, how do you convert your electricity to renewable and all of that. Or when unfortunate circumstances occur, like floods, some of our brand partners come through with contributions with relief efforts. We’ve tried to push that conversation on a much bigger level, but we find very limited forums to have that. There’s so much on the plate to be handled so that this is more of a supplier’s problem, so to speak. It’s not so much of a brand’s problem.”
Heat stress is also exacerbating precarious labor conditions in Asia’s garment industry. Already chronically underpaid workers are rarely compensated when they call in sick or they have to take care of unwell children, and frequent absenteeism can result in financial penalties or loss of employment. Even workers who can freely slake their thirst risk missing strict production goals because they also have to take more frequent trips to the restroom. More often than not, however, workers are routinely denied such breaks because poor costing models fail to account for their basic needs.
“This forces workers to avoid drinking water—one of the leading causes of fainting during the summer,” said Thivya Rakini, president of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union, a Dalit women-led trade union of textile workers in India, where the temperatures topped 53 degrees Celsius (127 degrees Fahrenheit) in June. In the Tamil Nadu city of Dindigul, for instance, workers can be required to churn out 1,000 units a day. It’s an endeavor that would be a challenge even if there were adequate ventilation systems, regular cooling breaks, sufficient drinking water and shift adjustments to avoid peak heat hours.
All of this ends up having a “compounding impact, not only on workers, who are predominantly female, but their families as well,” said Sonia Mistry, climate and labor justice director at the Solidarity Center, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. Workers who are not able to fulfill quotas within the allotted hours might be forced into overtime or face potential harassment or violence from managers who are themselves feeling the pressure from brands to wrap up orders on time. The fact that crackdowns on trade unions and freedom of association are growing, particularly in more repressive nations, doesn’t help. Early data from a Solidarity Center study in Cambodia, in fact, indicates that workers who are represented by a union are better able to manage the impacts of heat stress.
“There are next-level discussions that need to happen at the industry level and at the national level over climate adaptation policies,” she said. “But unions must be given a meaningful place at the table to bargain over issues as the first, very necessary step to address the immediate impact that workers are facing. These issues must be considered part of climate adaptation policy if we actually want to build resilience for workers in their communities.”
Minimum occupational safety and health requirements are a mixed bag. National legal frameworks that specify thresholds for indoor heat and ventilation, breaks and drinking water, along with social protections involving work stoppages or paid leave, are often weak or fuzzy, according to a 2023 study by the ILR Global Labor Institute at Cornell University. And where guidelines exist, lax regulatory regimes could render them meaningless box-checking exercises.
“So in Cambodia, the law says the temperature should not be such that it affects workers’ health,” said Jason Judd, the school’s executive director. “That’s worse than useless because the government can point to a standard and say, ‘Well, of course, we have a legal standard, so don’t worry, it’s covered.’ But of course, the standard’s meaningless. How could you enforce that?”
Suggestions by multi-stakeholder organizations have been equally broad—and even less enforceable because they’re voluntary. The Fair Labor Association, whose roster includes Adidas, Patagonia and Lululemon, for instance, requires that suppliers to its member brands “provide a safe and healthy workplace setting to prevent accidents and injury to health arising out of, linked with, or occurring in the course of work or as a result of the operation of employers’ facilities.” Most brand codes of conduct fall similarly short, the Global Labor Institute found.
Even so, the issue of climate change is an existential one for garment production. Judd’s report estimates that slumping productivity triggered by worsening temperatures and flooding could reduce the export earnings of four of the world’s top garment-producing countries, including Bangladesh and Cambodia, by $65 billion by 2030. It could also prevent the creation of 1 million jobs and erode the profits of affected brands by at least 5 percent.
But data on the extent of the problem is scarce because even basic measures like taking indoor thermometer readings are being ignored. Meanwhile, Judd said, workers are bearing the brunt of climate change as their health and earnings suffer. And though mandatory due diligence legislation from Europe could be a lever to get laggards to act, since the risk of legal liability for knowingly harming workers is considerable, it’s “not fast-moving.”
The Global Labor Institute’s next round of research will center on how to “square the circle” on the emissions issue. Air conditioning isn’t the only recourse, Judd said. More affordable and less energy-intensive options—such as evaporative cooling systems and wind corridors—exist, though these still require initial investment that may not be readily available. Sri Lanka’s MAS Holdings picked a spot near the lake for its new facility in India because its design features can take advantage of the abundant wind to keep temperatures down. At its factory in Cambodia, Outland Denim uses a method of heat extraction involving breezeways and a roof ventilation device known as a whirlybird. Karupannya Rangpur in Bangladesh is shrouded in leaves and vines that make it look like it’s peeking out from a forest.
Judd said that one of the possible approaches to “squaring the circle” is to think about mitigation and adaptation together so that one offsets the other. “You get your greenhouse gas emissions reductions through the mitigation investment, and you get your financial savings, your ROI, on the adaptation side,” he said. “These are the kinds of things factories and brands should be thinking about together. The world needs both.”
One trouble with dealing with heat as a workplace hazard is that unlike, say, asbestos or a chemical pesticide, it can’t be isolated and removed, said Halshka Graczyk, a technical specialist at the International Labour Organization and co-author of a July report about the health and safety implications of heat stress at work.
“Heat is a pervasive hazard,” she said. “It’s not easy to eliminate. It’s also a hazard that is very difficult to interpret when it comes to physiological symptoms. Workers might be aware that it’s hot, but many don’t have the awareness of what type of symptoms can lead to these really severe outcomes. And so this is something that calls attention and rings the alarm bells when it comes to effective policy measures.”
There are other reasons why occupational safety and health regulations haven’t kept up. For one thing, the changing threat of climate change is only intensifying. For another, labor migration patterns are shifting in the world of work. Rarely is there a one-size-fits-all solution in terms of blanket policies, Graczyk said.
“We know that acclimatization is very important for heat stress and for injury,” she said. “So if you have workers coming from one part of the world to another and quickly have to start working in extremely hot and humid conditions that their bodies are not used to, this is where you have the biggest risk.”
That’s not to say nothing can be done about it. Next year, the United Nations agency will host a tripartite meeting that brings together workers, employers and governments from different countries to try to establish some baseline international policy guidance. Implementing the right measures could not only help stave off some of the nearly 19,000 deaths and 23 million injuries that happen every year because of excessive heat, but also save $361 billion from the economic harm that it generates globally.
The garment sector’s climate woes appear more intractable in the case of subcontracted or home-based workers, whose lack of formalization means they have no social protections to speak of, let alone any kind of steady wage, since they’re usually paid a paltry piece rate. In India, the Self Employed Women’s Association, better known by its acronym SEWA, recently launched a heat wave insurance program for its members, providing financial assistance to workers who need extra funds to stay healthy. Such efforts are few and far between, however.
What the industry needs to realize is that the soaring temperatures are here to stay, said Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president at Epic Group, a Hong Kong-based apparel manufacturing giant with factories in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Jordan. Until there’s that mental shift from both brands and suppliers, little will change, he said.
We still haven’t come to terms globally in any industry—not just garments—that this is a new normal, and this is going to be recurrent,” Ralapanawe said. “And the reason everybody’s scared of even broaching the subject is who’s going to pay for it? I think what we need in the industry is a real conversation about decarbonization and climate action. And what I mean by real conversation is understanding the problem, understanding the risks and stakeholders getting together to talk about it.”
Suppliers already know what needs to be done in terms of adaptation and mitigation, he said. What they cannot do is accomplish all that within the current business model of constant margin-shaving.
“It’s not a training issue, it’s not an intent issue, it’s a business model and finance issue,” Ralapanawe said. “So long as we are keeping that out of the conversation, we are not going to solve it, whether it’s decarbonization or adaptation.”
This article ran in Sourcing Journal’s recent Sustainability Report. To download the full report, click here.
Solve the daily Crossword
