On the Line is a weekly roundup of sourcing and labor quick hits in the apparel and footwear industry, from worker protests to boardroom maneuvering, tracking the developments shaping conditions on the factory floor and beyond.
Heating up
Heat stress from rising temperatures is taking a toll on worker health, safety and productivity in Ethiopia, Ghana, Lebanon, the Maldives, Senegal and Sri Lanka, with broader implications for the countries’ economies, a new set of studies from the International Labour Organization has found.
While “every single industry and every single workplace will stand to benefit from adapting workplaces to heat stress,” Andreas Floris, lead author of the studies, said at their launch on Thursday, the risks are most acute in countries with high levels of outdoor and labor-intensive employment. The extent to which heat stress reshapes the world of work also depends on a country’s climate conditions, economic and employment structures and adaptive capacity.
Climate change, according to the ILO, is poised to cause worsening job and economic losses across all six countries, especially under high-emissions scenarios, with 5,500 to 6,100 full-time-equivalent jobs expected to be shed in the Maldives and 5 million to 6 million in Ethiopia by 2060. The corresponding annual GDP losses could reach $310.3 billion in Ethiopia and $1.7 billion in the Maldives.
Even under a low-emissions pathway, however, the Maldives could shed about 2,400 full-time-equivalent jobs by 2040, while Ethiopia could lose 1.78 million. The impact would also be substantial in Lebanon, with 21,700 projected job losses, alongside 129,000 in Senegal, 145,000 in Sri Lanka and 550,000 in Ghana.
Experts say that advancing a just transition and promoting decent work will be critical to ensuring that workers are protected from heat stress while enabling enterprises to respond to changing conditions.
“Social dialogue is our best adaptation tool to heat stress,” said Alpha Dia, professor and researcher at the National Employers’ Council in Senegal. “It will protect workers while reinforcing the resilience of companies.”
Rescue operation
At least 19 children aged 10 to 17 were rescued from garment and artificial jewelry factories in the Gandhi Nagar area of India’s East Delhi district, and nine factory owners were arrested, authorities said Wednesday. The children had toiled in the facilities for roughly eight months, earning as little as 10 Indian rupees, or 11 cents, a day for shifts that stretched from morning to night.
“The children were taken far from their homes and deprived of their childhood,” Dhananjay Tingal, the national coordinator of the Association for Voluntary Action, a nonprofit that seeks to prevent child exploitation, told The Hindu. “At an age when they should have been holding books and toys, they were working with needles, threads and machines.”
Many of the children had been brought to Delhi from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, states in northern and eastern India, respectively. According to The Hindu, two of the children said they worked from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, slept inside the factory at night and resumed work the next morning. Five of the rescued children were below the age of 14.
The children underwent medical examinations and were sent to a children’s home. Police have registered a First Information Report against the factory owners under the 2015 Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, the 1986 Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act and the 2024 Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
Factory fires
A major fire ripped through a fabric storage building at YTC Corporation’s garment factory in Cambodia’s Kampong Speu province on Monday, destroying the facility and 150 sewing machines, local media reported. No injuries were reported.
Firefighters deployed 10 fire engines and 107 personnel, pumping 61 truckloads of water for nearly five hours to bring the blaze under control and stop it from spreading to other buildings in the factory compound. According to public data, the facility was shipping girls’ and women’s clothing to multinational brands such as Gap Inc. as recently as January.
Police said the cause of the fire remains unknown and that investigations are continuing.
“Worker safety is the ministry’s top priority. Senior ministry officials, together with representatives of the provincial labor department and the National Social Security Fund, arrived at the scene immediately and coordinated with local authorities to facilitate workers’ evacuation from the factory and their safe return home,” Sun Mesa, spokesman for the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training, told The Phnom Penh Post. “Our workers are safe, and no one was injured.”
In Bangladesh over the weekend, a fire tore through the carton warehouse of Supreme Stitch Limited, also known as Supreme Garments, and the yarn warehouse of DBL Garments in Gazipur before nine firefighting units brought it under control after nearly three hours. While no casualties were reported, the fire severely damaged a tin-shed structure.
