"The world’s garment workers are on the front lines of climate impacts", May 2 2024

... Workers at Yakjin [a South Korean-owned garment factory in Cambodia] say the heat often leads to near-fainting episodes, fatigue, and dehydration. With no windows, the air feels stifling but their requests for fans are at times ignored. 

Workers at three other factories in Phnom Penh, the country’s capital, producing clothes for brands like Primark, H&M, and Old Navy (owned by Gap Inc.), told similar stories of worsening heat.

Around the world, fashion’s mostly female labor force is grappling with working conditions made increasingly unbearable and unhealthy by climate change. Women picking cotton in India’s sun-baked fields are toiling in temperatures of roughly 113 degrees Fahrenheit, while workers in Ghana’s Kantamanto — one of the world’s largest secondhand markets where clothing discarded by Western consumers is resold — are losing vital wages when flooding prevents trade.

[...]

“[Labor] violations in factories are so gross, as in so widespread, and so awful … that that’s where the attention has been,” said Liz Parker, an associate member of Clean Clothes Campaign, an Amsterdam-based alliance of labor unions and nongovernmental organizations. “But workers are suffering from heat stress, from flooding, from water pollution … and we need to protect [them] from that as well.” 

To expose how climate change is impacting workers throughout fashion’s supply chain, The Fuller Project tracked products from several brands — including Walmart, Primark, H&M, Gap, and Old Navy — across several countries. At each stage, women play a vital role in the global business of fashion, yet their livelihoods — and lives — are being increasingly threatened by extreme weather. 

[...]

Of the five brands examined across India, Cambodia, and Ghana, only Primark and H&M provided details in response to queries about what they are doing to protect workers in their global supply chain from climate change. Primark said it knows it must “act to mitigate” the causes and effects of climate change and support its supply chain partners in similar efforts, such as educating farmers in its Sustainable Cotton Programme, a training scheme. H&M said it is aware of the impact that climate change has on the people in its supply chains and will “constantly review and adapt” the scope of its climate-related risks.

For decades, the fashion industry’s exploitation of workers in low-income countries has been well documented. But a new challenge now presents itself: Who will protect them from a climate crisis that the very same industry helped bring about?  

[...]