texfash: Your new study highlights the severe and unequal impact of heat stress on workers across different sectors in Cambodia. Given that the garment industry is one of the country's largest employers, how do you see its labour structure and factory conditions interacting with the heat vulnerabilities you have documented?
Laurie Parsons: What this study shows is that the climate crisis has to be seen through the lens of labour. We are well used to the idea of climate change as a function of time, getting worse every year—and to a lesser extent we are used to the idea of climate change as shaped by space.
But using new technology what we can see is how huge a factor the work that you do is in your vulnerability to climate change. More so still, the labour that happens in places like Cambodia is not independent to that country. It is a part of a wider global system of production. So not only does industry produce climate change through emissions. It produces climate vulnerability through labour.
The research shows that workers with less power and fewer protections face the highest exposure to dangerous heat. In Cambodia’s garment sector, where many workers are women in precarious employment, how might this intersection of gender, informality, and climate risk intensify existing inequalities?
Laurie Parsons: This is one of the key findings. Workers are actually very good at identifying when they are in danger of overheating, but in many work settings, they don’t have the option to stop or slow down. This means they overheat and risk health problems not as a result of the ambient temperature, but of the combination of that temperature with a labour regime that doesn’t allow them the freedom to mitigate it.
This not only opens up a new way of at looking at the root of climate vulnerability, but also of resolving it. If we can give workers a little more power over their working conditions, then we can ameliorate the worst impacts of the climate crisis very cheaply.
