During a recent visit to a garment factory in the city of Dindigul, Indian trade unionist Thivya Rakini fainted after just two hours in the extreme heat. Temperatures on the factory floor had soared to 38.6°C.
In her viral LinkedIn post recounting the experience, Rakini reflected on the plight of the millions of garment workers who operate in these conditions day after day, often struggling with heat rashes, dizzy spells and extreme exhaustion. “I had eaten, stayed hydrated and was wearing breathable cotton. Still, I couldn’t withstand the heat,” she wrote. “But these women work here for nine hours a day, under intense production pressure, wrapped in synthetic uniforms [...] Meanwhile, just a few feet away, senior staff sit in air-conditioned offices, fully insulated from this reality. What are we doing? Where is our humanity?”
From the catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles to large-scale flooding across Europe, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, with implications for all.
Between March and April, members of Rakini’s union, the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU), reported indoor temperatures of between 35°C and 40°C across the state of Tamil Nadu. But extreme heat is not unique to India. In 2023, the Cornell ILR School’s Global Labour Institute estimated that extreme weather could jeopardise up to $65 billion worth of apparel exports before 2030, and that’s only accounting for Cambodia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Vietnam.
“I don’t think any brand can confidently say this doesn’t happen in one of their factories,” says professor Jean Jenkins, who leads employment relations at Cardiff Business School, specialising in labour rights and working conditions in low-paid employment such as garment work. Workers being unable or discouraged to take breaks exacerbates the heat dangers, and the physical toll of working through extreme heat can lead to urinary tract infections, fainting, thrush and menstrual complications. “There is a risk to speaking up, and that is highly problematic.”
Fashion’s production model is directly contributing to these conditions. Without transformation, the fashion industry is projected to contribute to growing greenhouse gas emissions and worsening climate change, which will “intensify extreme weather events such as heatwaves and flooding in major sourcing regions, disrupting production and endangering the health and livelihoods of already vulnerable workers”, Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) labour rights programme manager Natalie Swan said in a statement. In its latest analysis, BHRRC found that 65 top fashion brands are failing to integrate worker rights and representation into their climate strategies, with heat stress emerging as a key concern, because the most straightforward solution — air conditioning — increases energy consumption, undermining decarbonisation targets.
“There is a critical need to act now, before the window for meaningful intervention closes, but the fashion industry’s climate targets mean little if the people who make its products are not taken into consideration,” Swan continued. “While urgent decarbonisation of the industry is crucial, companies are failing to recognise the ways in which this rapid process is likely to impact the human rights of workers in their supply chains. Decarbonisation done without workers as critical and creative partners is not a just transition, it’s a dangerous shortcut.”
A rock and a hard place
Within fashion supply chains, heat stress is a long-standing phenomenon that is becoming progressively worse — but understanding its impacts remains fairly nascent. “Factories have always been hotter than outside temperatures, and this is only getting worse with climate change,” says Nandita Shivakumar, a labour rights researcher who works closely with TTCU. Some types of production require higher levels of heat and humidity, for example, to keep yarn from breaking, so extreme heat can be hard to avoid. “When you have poor working conditions combined with extreme heat, it creates a horrifying lived experience for workers. This can be life threatening, and a lot of the problem comes down to inaction from fashion brands.”
There is dry heat and humid heat — both are “suffocating”, says Shivakumar. “In Tamil Nadu, you get a combination in different regions. In humid heat, you have that pressure-cooker feeling and you sweat a lot. In dry heat, sometimes the body doesn’t realise how bad it is straight away, so heat stroke or fainting can come on very suddenly. No one has ever asked me about the difference before. That’s how early in this conversation we are.”
Funding for factory solutions is limited. In the Çerkezköy industrial area of Türkiye, just over an hour by car from Istanbul, workers at the Erak Denim factory struggled with heat stress for years. Many work in a static position over their eight-hour shifts, quickly starting to sweat as the outside temperatures rise and machinery generates excess heat inside. Some would feel faint, others lost focus; the pressure built with the risk of mistakes and minor injuries. “For the past three years, the factory felt like it was literally boiling, especially in the areas where we have boilers, washing machines and tumble dryers,” says Gizem Öztürk, sustainability chief at Erak Denim. Factory management installed a cooling system that transformed groundwater from a local well into cold steam for €60,000 — much cheaper than quotes for air conditioning at €250,000 — which was entirely self-funded, says Öztürk.
Without much funding, suppliers in the Global South are caught between a rock and a hard place, says Dr Hakan Karaosman, associate professor at Cardiff University and co-founder of Fashion’s Responsible Supply Chain Hub (FReSCH), an EU-backed action research project. Suppliers tend to be on the frontlines of extreme weather and climate change, which means they are dealing with heat stress right now, and know it will likely get worse as time goes by. On the flip side, they often have the tightest margins to invest in protections, and are therefore the least equipped to deal with these environments, either through mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit the extent of future warming) or adaptation (adjusting to the impacts of climate change that are already happening or are expected to happen). “Workers are always the ones that pay the price, because they are seen as a resource to be optimised,” Karaosman says.
The fundamental tension between dealing with heat stress and treating workers with dignity is baked into fashion’s current business model, he continues. Even a simple solution like providing cleaner, colder drinking water becomes difficult to achieve when there are high production targets to meet: if workers drink more water, they need more bathroom breaks, which disrupts production. Turkish manufacturer Yavuzçehre Tekstil has found a way around this by supplying a yoghurt-based drink that helps with hydration, and by training workers to notice the first signs of heat stress so they can flag issues before things escalate.
Still, the holistic nature of heat stress — and the way it can exacerbate existing or underlying conditions — also makes it hard to attribute ailments to the heat, which can stall action.
“In my experience, brands only act when workers die and it becomes a reputational threat — look at the Rana Plaza factory collapse and the International Accord that came out of it,” says Shivakumar. “With heat stress, it won’t be a fast death or a media moment, but there will be deaths. Are you going to wait for that to happen, or are you going to act?” She is now working on research that explores the specific health impacts for women, which can be directly traced back to heat stress. Early indicators include more clotting during menstruation, severe haemorrhoids and fainting.
Shivakumar recommends that brands use heat data and climate-forecasting tools to identify the areas of their supply chain most susceptible to extreme heat, and then talk to suppliers directly to co-finance solutions. “We can figure out the lowest-cost solutions, but brands need to at least come to the table and be willing to have the conversation, which we are not seeing yet.”
“We cannot make these decisions in boardrooms cooled by air conditioning,” adds Karaosman. “People who have experienced the heat will know best how to fix it.”
Correction: Erak Denim s cooling system was self-funded (03/07/2025).
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