Weaving Fairness: How Women Workers Hold the Key to Climate Resilience in the Garment, Footwear, and Textile Sectors

Climate change is already hitting the garment, footwear, and textiles sectors hard. Its impacts are rapidly compounding for both workers and businesses in countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia. Extreme heat, heavy rainfall and flooding, droughts, pollution, and other climate hazards are exacerbating existing factory problems and putting workers' lives and livelihoods, as well as business resilience, at immediate and long-term risk.

Climate change worsens existing challenges, which disproportionately affect women workers, and can lead to cascading consequences across workers’ lives. In facilities with limited air circulation, for example, rising temperatures can make working conditions unbearable. Extreme heat causes dehydration and fainting putting workers’ health at serious risk. It also reduces productivity and time on the job, resulting in immediate income loss for workers who are already struggling financially. Women workers often juggle factory jobs with unpaid care and domestic work, exposing them to heat and humidity for longer periods with less time to recover. To cite another example, flooded roads can delay workers’ arrival at work, which can result in lost wages and cause them to be reprimanded by their supervisors, who are under pressure to meet strict productivity targets. When workers struggle, productivity drops and absenteeism rises, which threatens both workers’ well-being and business operations.

3 Critical Actions

Climate-resilient adaptation and mitigation measures that are inclusive of workers and consider the differing needs of women and men, in both process and outcome, can help the sector address intensifying climate impacts. These measures include:
• Improve factory environments to support workers in a changing climate
• Reimagine factory schedules, operations, and policies to manage climate disruptions
• Reinforce and sustain well-being and social protection systems to help workers navigate climate risks

About Why Worker-Centered Solutions Are Key to Climate Resilience

Developed through direct consultation with both women and men workers, factory managers, NGOs, funders, international buyers, worker unions and women’s rights groups, this report highlights the consequences of climate change on all workers, while drawing attention to specific impacts on women—who make up most of the workforce and experience the greater challenges.

This report shows that climate adaptation and mitigation efforts will only have meaningful impact if they put workers first. As workers experience climate impacts personally, their insights can help design and implement solutions that actually work. By addressing these challenges through collaborative action, climate adaptation and mitigation can protect the majority of the workforce while strengthening business resilience.