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(Image credit: Getty Images/Marie Claire) Share Copy link Facebook X Pinterest Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter For garment workers in the dense industrial hub that surrounds Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, a typical day begins at 5am. They make breakfast for their families and clean the house before walking to work—a journey that can take up to an hour.
In Dhaka, the weather is both warm and humid—the temperature rarely drops below 26°C, and in the summer months it can reach as high as 45°C. During heatwaves, which are increasingly frequent and protracted as global warming's consequences land, inside the factories, where T-shirts and trousers are made for the world's biggest clothing companies, temperatures can be a sweltering 38°C.
And it's not just in Bangladesh—across China, India and Vietnam, where much of the world's clothing is produced, rising heat stress is threatening the lives and health of the people (mostly women) who work along the supply chain. Less than two per cent of them are paid a living wage to cut and assemble clothing under the immense pressure of volume-based production targets.
The speed of their labour is the last price component that can be squeezed in fashion's seemingly bottomless search for the cheapest goods. Materials, electricity and logistic costs are relatively fixed, so when a fashion brand demands a lower price, labour is the only movable variable.
Now, ultra-fast-fashion brands and mass retailers, from Shein to Kmart, sell T-shirts for as little as £2.16. Before the retail mark-up is applied, the cost price might be just a third of this. And once fabric and overheads are accounted for, there are mere cents left for the people who construct and sew garments.
As heat adds another layer of stress and risk to jobs already fraught with zero-hour contracts (where there is no guarantee of minimum hours), no sick leave and hazardous working environments, the fashion industry is facing a reckoning over its treatment of workers.
"We wear bras, blouses, sarees and aprons in 40°C heat. It feels like being locked inside a pressure cooker at high flame," says a 36-year-old sewing machine operator from India who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Sometimes, I think I'm like a broiler chicken—just waiting to burst."
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She has been working in the garment industry for nine years and has a number of strategies in place to meet her production targets, fearing scolding from line supervisors if she falls behind. She avoids drinking water to minimise toilet use and chews gum to suppress thirst. "I only pee at lunch or after I reach home," she says. "That's how I survive, by controlling my body."
Another 39-year-old woman from India works as a fusing operator—a physically demanding job using a heat press machine to attach brand labels onto garments. She has been in the industry for five years and works at a factory that produces clothes for major international brands where the production pressure to meet high volume targets is intense. "If I go to the toilet, when I come back, my table is loaded with garment pieces and I'll be yelled at. So I control myself from peeing to avoid scolding. I hardly drink water—only when I feel like fainting will I drink a little," she says.
A 33-year-old tailor (also from India) who works six days a week to support her household describes the factory—which has no ventilation and only a few functioning fans—as a "furnace with no relief" in the summer months. She is on a day-pay contract with minimal security and no benefits and is expected to make 120 to 130 pieces per hour.
"If I don't meet my piece count, I won't get paid," she says. "We don't even have time to wipe the sweat off our faces. If we stop, the pieces won't get done—and then the supervisor scolds us in front of everyone. That's very humiliating." As we have seen across Europe this summer, extreme heat is no longer a projected threat—it is already disrupting lives all over the world. Every one of the past 11 years has been one of the hottest on record.
If I go to the toilet, when I come back, my table is loaded with garment pieces and I'll be yelled at.
The World Meteorological Organisation has confirmed that the global average surface temperature in 2025 was 1.44°C above the pre-industrial average.
In the worst affected places, temperatures are also rising at night, limiting the ability of anyone without air conditioning to experience a reprieve. But despite its prevalence, and the fact that it is the leading cause of weather-related deaths globally, heat is viewed differently to other extreme weather events. Because droughts, floods and bushfires are visually more dramatic, the threat they pose to human life is better understood.
By contrast, extreme heat is viewed as an annoyance, and experts say we are unprepared for its catastrophic health impacts and how unevenly it affects different social groups. Dr Harshita Umesh is the founder of Vaada Hope Foundation and a surgeon in training from Bengaluru, India.
Garment workers present at the hospital where she is a resident with a range of health problems, many of them compounded by the heat and their precarious working conditions. These include dehydration, headaches, fainting, cardiovascular strain, an inability to concentrate which results in injury, gastrointestinal issues from food spoilage and insufficient water intake, urinary tract infections, kidney stones and irritability that can result in violence from their managers.
To make matters worse for the women inside the factories, extreme heat's impact on menopause, pregnancy and fertility is under-researched. "Garment workers usually drink very, very little water so that they don't have to use the restroom. The consequences of that ends up being a urinary tract infection, it ends up being sepsis, it ends up being kidney stones, it ends up being people in the hospital," Umesh says. Heat is "an underlying stress that exacerbates everything else around it", especially for female garment workers who may already be in "a chronic condition of starvation and are under a lot of stress already".
In two reports released at the end of 2025, human rights campaigners Amnesty International accused fashion brands, factory owners and the governments of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka of failing to ensure garment workers had the right to unionise and collectively bargain.
The harsh reality of these workers' lives—powerless to demand better conditions and under such intense time pressure that bathroom breaks are out of reach—is just one part of the inhumanity in these jobs.
Garment workers usually drink very, very little water so that they don't have to use the restroom.
Another is that they do not have paid sick leave, and Umesh recounts stories of women who present in hospital, needing treatment, but refuse it because they cannot afford to take the time off work. "If you have a quota to meet, you might not go to the doctor on time," she says. Meaning something like a small injury to a finger can get infected and swollen. Usually, such an injury would be curable with medication and time, but if "you have to go back to work or your family will starve", you will refuse treatment.
She recounts incidents of patients returning when the infection becomes too bad to ignore—if it's spread to the bone, the only option to save their life is to amputate the finger. "Every garment we wear tells a story and it shouldn't be one of blood, sweat and tears," Umesh says. "Workers must be paid a living wage, not because the world is watching but out of respect for human dignity and life."
To make an already difficult situation even worse, the solutions—air conditioning and extra fans—are compromised by how much they cost to install, old infrastructure that cannot physically support them and by pressure from the fashion industry to decarbonise the supply chain, which means using less electricity, not more.
Solutions are further compromised by global instability impacting fuel sources. In May, due to energy shortages linked to the Iran war, Bangladesh manufacturers were forced to turn off fans and air conditioning to save power while temperatures peaked. Pivoting to renewable energy from solar panels seems like a logical solution, but infrastructure and who shoulders the expense of installation remains a barrier.
While the issues of the industry's environmental harms and contribution to global warming are entwined with the harm it perpetrates on workers in its supply chains —namely through over-production—there is an urgency missing from the industry's approach to the health impacts of heat stress. Grace Forrest, the founding director of the human rights organisation Walk Free, believes the fashion industry is too focused on innovation to lessen its environmental footprint.
"Right now, harmful impact is far outpacing the delivery of effective and structural sustainability solutions," she says. "Many of the 'solutions' will not address the human harms stitched into the fashion industry."
Dr Hakan Karaosman is a supply chain expert and associate professor at Politecnico di Milano. He believes at least part of the solution is fashion brands changing their business models and accepting that they must pay a fair price. "We are seeing production as a commodity. We are seeing workers as a commodity. So we don't really humanise the workforce," he explains. "Let's ask the workers how we can help them improve their conditions so they can be more dignified."
The women who gave their voices to this article asked for urgent, basic interventions that are so simple it is heartbreaking to consider how difficult their working days are. "A glass of lime water—if [lime] is too expensive, then at least cold water. Something to make it bearable," the 33-year-old tailor says.
Other requests include more frequent and unpenalised toilet breaks, air coolers or air conditioners during high-temperature periods, electrolyte water, better ventilation and roofs that are made of materials other than metal. The 36-year-old sewing machine operator asks for something that would help the people at the top—those making the decisions that impact the workers' lives—have more empathy for them.
"Let the directors of these fashion brands sit in our seats—just for one hour," she says. "Let them feel this heat, this sweat, this pain. Maybe then they'll realise that they are killing us for their profits."
This story was initially published by Lucianne Toni on the Marie Claire Australia website
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Source: Fashion