Workers

Between 2015 and 2023 federal labour inspections in Mexico fell by close to 70 per cent, and barely one in a hundred reached the textile industry. A recent study shows the shortfall is not merely a matter of scarce resources but of design, with a statutory limit and a jurisdictional dispute together leaving four-fifths of the garment sector unreachable.

Ten years is a long horizon in any industry, but in AI it may be a category error. Fashion for Good's mapping of a 2036 AI-native supply chain is technically grounded and operationally serious. The structural questions it leaves unanswered, around rebound effects, labour transition, legal accountability, and regulatory reach, are the ones that will determine whether the vision it describes produces genuine progress or faster versions of the same systemic failures.

Near-sightedness among garment workers costs low-income economies billions in lost productivity each year. Correcting vision with glasses costing around ten dollars per worker lifted factory output by almost six per cent over a twelve-week period. Scaling the intervention across the global textile and garment sector could generate an additional $27 billion annually.

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.