Workers

Extreme heat has become a growing workplace safety concern across global apparel, footwear and travel goods supply chains, prompting new operational guidance for factories, buyers and suppliers. The recommendations cover heat thresholds, structural mitigation, workload adjustment, education, medical monitoring, shared buyer-supplier responsibility, and compliance with labour and public health codes.

Climate resilience, productivity and workplace safety are being advanced across Ethiopia's leather, textile and garment sector through a new ILO-Japan joint initiative. The one-year programme targets 40 factories across five cities, integrating Japanese expertise, digitalised safety tools and a women's leadership development programme to drive sustainable and inclusive industrial growth.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent shockwaves through global energy markets, but in Surat, India's manmade textile hub, the impact arrived not in boardrooms but in workers' kitchens. With LPG unavailable and alternatives prohibited by landlords, thousands of migrant textile workers have been forced to abandon their livelihoods and return home, triggering a production crisis that the industry is still struggling to contain.

Thirteen years after Rana Plaza killed more than a thousand garment workers in Savar, the disaster is still generating money. The question survivors are now asking is where it goes. Recently, the Rana Plaza Survivors Association turned its demands away from brands and factory owners and toward the institutions that built campaigns, funding streams and organisational visibility around their suffering—and that, in survivors' view, have not been required to account to them for how those funds were used.

Across India's garment manufacturing hubs, summer no longer arrives as a seasonal inconvenience. It arrives as a compounding risk — one that interacts with factory design, production discipline, and supply-chain economics to concentrate thermal strain on workers who have the least power to resist it. The findings of a HeatWatch-TISS study, drawn from 115 workers, 15 factory units, and a focus group of home-based subcontracted workers in Delhi-NCR, lay out the mechanisms behind that exposure with unusual precision.

Argentina's textile sector has shed more than 18,000 jobs since 2023, as tariff reductions, collapsing domestic demand, and irregular imports converge into a structural crisis with no clear floor. The closure of a vertically integrated cotton-textile firm over 100 years old — operating across two provinces since 1914 — has become the most visible signal that formal industrial employment in the country's northeast is in serious retreat.

The UK garment manufacturing sector has long been positioned as a responsible alternative to offshore production—faster, closer, and more accountable. A new study challenges that framing. It finds that the same brands promoting domestic sourcing are routinely transferring financial risk onto the factories that make their products—through pricing practices, cancellations, and contract terms that consistently favour the buyer.

A new Roadmap has urged global fashion brands sourcing from major garment-producing hubs to fund and implement a Just Energy Transition across their supply chains, warning that persistent financing gaps, weak adaptation measures and price-driven purchasing practices are shifting climate risks onto suppliers and workers throughout production networks.

An OECD and EUIPO report has presented new empirical evidence linking illicit trade in counterfeit goods with labour exploitation, including forced labour and hazardous child labour. Using correlation analysis and econometric modelling, it finds that economies associated with illicit trade in counterfeit goods often show weaker labour protections, higher informality and poorer workplace safety. The findings call for integrated enforcement and labour-governance responses.

A new University of Sydney–led study shows that low-cost, sustainable cooling strategies could safeguard millions of garment workers facing extreme heat. Simulations of Bangladeshi factories revealed that reflective roofs, fans, and access to drinking water reduce core temperature and maintain productivity, offering scalable protection for an industry employing over four million people.