Garment factories are sweltering. These simple fixes could keep workers safe

As global heating intensifies, protecting garment workers – the majority of them women – is both a moral and economic imperative, say University of Sydney researchers.

University of Sydney

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A study participant sewing in the University of Sydney's climate chamber

 

 

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Credit: Louise Cooper, University of Sydney

Garment workers face some of the most precarious working conditions in the world and are increasingly at risk from extreme heat stress caused by climate change. A new University of Sydney-led study reveals how simple, affordable interventions could offer critical protection to those working in dangerously hot conditions. Published in The Lancet Planetary Health, the study identifies low-cost and scalable strategies that can reduce heat stress and protect worker productivity in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment (RMG) sector – a $45 billion industry employing over 4 million people, most of them women. It represents 80 percent of Bangladesh's export revenue and is the fourth-largest garment exporter in the world. 

In Bangladesh’s RMG factories, indoor temperatures often soar above 35°C and can reach as high as 40°C. Production halls are typically hot, humid, and poorly ventilated, with the constant use of heat-generating machinery like irons and steamers making the air thick and stifling.  

Workers spend up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, in these conditions which, over time, can take a considerable toll, causing dehydration, heat exhaustion, and a noticeable drop in energy and concentration, putting workers’ health and wellbeing at serious risk. Most workers are paid by the piece, creating a difficult trade-off: slow down to stay safe in the heat – and earn less – or maintain speed and risk serious illness. 

“Garment workers in Bangladesh already endure some of the most precarious and grueling conditions in the world. With rising temperatures, it’s only getting worse,” said the study’s senior author, Director of the Heat and Health Research Centre at the University of Sydney, Professor Ollie Jay. “Without immediate, scalable, and affordable cooling solutions, millions face a serious and growing risk of heat-related illness, exhaustion, and long-term harm.” 

To address this, Professor Jay’s team looked at the effects of various cooling alternatives to air conditioning on worker heat strain in a simulated Bangladesh garment factory inside a climate-controlled chamber, replicating the hottest conditions recorded inside a typical factory in Dhaka.  
 
They tested simple cooling interventions such as insulated reflective roofs, electric fans, and free access to drinking water, and benchmarked them against air conditioning and no cooling at all. 

They found: 

• Without cooling interventions, heat stress reduced work output by around 12 to 15 percent. These losses were partly recovered through the team’s sustainable cooling strategies, which prioritised cooling the individual instead of altering the surrounding environment, such as using fans and drinking water.

• A 2.5°C indoor temperature reduction from an insulated, reflective white roof lowered core body temperature, heart rate, and dehydration risk. 

• Electric fan use combined with access to drinking water delivered similar benefits, reclaiming much of the heat-related productivity loss seen in high-intensity tasks like ironing. 

• Cooling effects were more pronounced in male participants, highlighting the importance of reconsidering gender-specific tasks and clothing in heat mitigation strategies. 

“The findings offer practical, scalable solutions for factory owners seeking to improve working conditions without relying on air conditioning, which remains economically and environmentally unsustainable,” said lead author Dr James Smallcombe, a post-doctoral research fellow in the Heat and Health Research Centre. “With Bangladesh’s RMG industry targeting a 30 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, these low-resource options could offer a viable path forward for a sector under increasing pressure from both global demand and a changing climate.” 

“The fashion industry has a moral and ethical imperative to reduce heat stress for workers and ensure basic provisions, such as access to clean drinking water. That includes both companies and factory owners. While air conditioning may help, it should not be seen as a silver bullet; instead, sustainable, affordable cooling solutions should be considered to protect workers’ health and wellbeing,” said Dr Smallcombe. 

The full results suggest that improving building design and supporting worker hydration could become key pillars of climate adaptation in global supply chains, protecting both workers and business continuity. 

The Wellcome Trust funded the research. Dr Madeleine Thomson, Head of Climate Impacts & Adaptation at Wellcome, said: "Factory workers in sectors like the garment industry who are working in hot conditions are increasingly at risk from extreme heat stress caused by climate change.

This study highlights that without cooling interventions, workers face serious health risks and reduced productivity - impacting both individual and business earnings. Yet, it also shows that even small, science-based changes can lead to significant improvements in health, livelihoods, and the environment – a triple win for communities.

“Adaptation isn’t just about surviving climate shocks – it’s about building resilience and enabling communities to thrive. Leaders at every level - regional and national - must act now to deliver solutions that protect health and unlock opportunity.”

While the environmental conditions reflected those observed in Bangladesh, the findings are also relevant to other countries with large ready-made garment industries, such as India and Vietnam, where extreme conditions are also common. 

Bangladesh is widely recognised as one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, facing heightened risks from sea-level rise, extreme weather, and heat stress. Its garment industry accounts for 80 percent of Bangladesh's export revenue and is the fourth-largest garment exporter in the world.     

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Journal

The Lancet Planetary Health

DOI

10.1016/j.lanplh.2025.101317 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Sustainable cooling strategies for workers in the ready-made garment factory industry in Bangladesh under simulated extreme heat: a randomised crossover trial

Article Publication Date

20-Oct-2025

 

‘Slums’ of Victorian Manchester housed wealthy doctors and engineers, new study reveals

University of Cambridge

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An 1838 print showing people in and outside a terraced house in Manchester, above and below street level.

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Credit: Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries

 

 

Work, shopping, church and the pub kept different classes apart far more than ‘residential segregation’ in 1850s Manchester, undermining key assumptions about the Industrial Revolution. Historians have long assumed that Manchester’s middle classes sheltered from the poor in town houses and suburban villas. But by mapping digitized census data, new research shows that many middle-class Mancunians including doctors and engineers lived in the same buildings and streets as working-class residents including weavers and spinners.

 

• Over 60% of buildings housing the wealthiest classes also housed unskilled labourers.
• Over 10% of the population in Manchester’s ‘slums’ belonged to wealthier employed classes.
• Stark differences in work routines, recreational lives, shopping, public services, policing and pervasive discrimination isolated classes far more than residential segregation.

 

[Research paper proofs and images available here]

 

Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism, visited Manchester in 1842 and began recording examples of rampant inequality in the rapidly industrialising city.* He described a commercial core encircled by ‘unmixed working-peoples’ quarters, then the ‘middle bourgeoisie’ and further beyond, the upper classes. Many historians have relied on Engels’ account but the conflation of class division and spatial segregation has come under increasing scrutiny.

Now Cambridge University historian Emily Chung has used data from the digitized 1851 census to precisely map where people from different social classes were actually living in the city. Her findings, published today in The Historical Journal, are startling and undermine the idea that different classes clustered in separate parts of the city.

“Manchester’s wealthier classes did not confine themselves to town houses in the city centre and suburban villas, as we’ve been led to believe,” Emily Chung says. “I found doctors, engineers, architects, surveyors, teachers, managers and shop owners living in the same buildings as poor weavers and spinners.” 

“Segregation in cities remains a major concern in many parts of the world, including Britain, so understanding what people experienced in Manchester, one of the world’s first industrialised cities, is really important,” Chung says. “It teaches us that where we live matters but other factors can be even more influential. How people work, shop and relax divides social groups and can even make them invisible.”

Chung, a PhD researcher at St John's College, Cambridge, used ordnance survey maps, commercial directories and the 1851 census to link individuals to their specific residential address. She spent eight months painstakingly pinpointing buildings using known landmarks, including pubs, to guide her. At her most efficient, Chung could map 700 buildings per day. AI isn’t yet capable of doing this work accurately. Chung then used this huge dataset to analyse spatial patterns.

She used official occupational descriptors and wage data to categorize individuals into one of six classes:

1. Professional Occupations such as doctors, engineers and clergymen

2. Managerial and Technical Occupations, and Dealers, including shop owners

3. Skilled Occupations including clerks and those employed in the transport and building industries

4. Partly-Skilled, including police and labourers in semi-specialist industries

5. Unskilled general labourers

6. Unskilled labourers in the textile, mining and agricultural sectors

 

Chung found that the commercial district to Manchester’s southwest was significantly more socially diverse than the residential zones of the city to the north and east. But even in Ancoats, the main working-class slum which so appalled Engels, around 10% of the population belonged to the wealthier employed classes. Across the city, the working-class represented 79.3% per cent of the population on average.  

Looking at Manchester’s surrounding townships, Chung found that Cheetham had a higher proportion of upper-middle-class residents while Salford, traditionally viewed as a ‘working-class’ suburb, closely mirrored Manchester’s mixed population, as did Hulme and Chorlton-Cum-Medlock.

 

Sharing buildings

 

Chung’s findings became even more interesting when she zoomed in on individual buildings. She found that over 60% of the buildings which housed the wealthiest occupational classes also housed unskilled labourers.

“This was a big surprise,” Chung says. “I started with the city centre and I thought the pattern might end there but as I moved onto the next part of Manchester, I kept finding this mixing. The most exciting moment was discovering that one in ten people living in Ancoats, the notorious working-class slum, were middle-class.”

“Middle-class Mancunians might have seen their homes as stepping stones to something better,” Chung says. “But architects and shop owners also valued the convenience of living close to where they worked. Commuter trains weren’t popular yet.”

Chung argues that while different classes lived cheek-by-jowl, the construction, design, and maintenance of housing in 1850s Manchester limited interaction between them. In the first half of the 19th century, Manchester couldn’t build houses fast enough to keep up with its booming population.

“Manchester grew almost organically with very little regulation and developers were determined to make maximum profit from as little land as possible,” Chung says.

To do this, they converted existing buildings into subdivided tenements. More respectable ground- and first-floor units could be rented to one or two middle-class households, while multiple poor families were crammed into filthy underground cellars.

“Manchester’s housing experiment stacked multiple households one on top of another. Different classes were living so close together but walls, ceilings and different routines minimised interaction between them,” Chung says.

 

Segregating routines

 

Occupational status played a major role in segregating people through their daily routines, Chung argues. Before the introduction of labour reforms, many of Manchester’s semi- and unskilled workers put in twelve-hour days, six days a week, trapping them inside while wealthier people were free to move around the city, working, shopping and socialising.

The middle and upper classes had flexible access to shops and markets but factory workers often had to wait for their wages on Saturday evenings before they could buy food.

Chung says: “While Victorian London and Liverpool bustled with daytime activity, Manchester’s public spaces were almost deserted. Its streets were rarely occupied by weavers and doctors at the same time.”

 

Leisure and culture

 

The cultural and recreational habits of Manchester’s different classes reinforced their segregation, Chung argues, highlighting the opposing institutions of church and pub.

In this period, Manchester’s middle classes were increasingly drawn to church while the city’s 600 pubs had a far greater pull on the working classes. Churches no longer distributed poor relief as they had under the Old Poor Laws and public services made many poor people feel ashamed.

Even when the poor did attend, many churches and chapels deliberately kept different classes apart. Morning services rented out pews on an annual basis, and catered towards the middle and upper classes, while afternoon or evening services were more likely to be frequented by the working class who could not afford regular rents.

Pubs offered more welcoming and affordable respite for working-class Mancunians but, Chung points out, as soon as they went outside the city’s police were ready to re-enforce class segregation.

“Even small groups of working-class men were made to disperse by officers on rotation,” Chung says.

“They were determined to keep the city’s middle-and upper-class dominated public realm clear, clean and calm, so they forced the working poor out of sight into more neglected parts of the city.”

“What the Victorians ‘thought’ was happening in Manchester still matters, but comparing these perceptions against concrete geographic patterns means we can reconstruct life in the city more accurately. Then we can understand how those perceptions arose.”

One thing that remains a mystery is how multiple families from different classes shared outdoor toilets or privvies. “Annoyingly, this isn’t something that people wrote about at the time,” Chung says. “I suspect that the middle classes still used chamber pots so they weren’t so reliant on shared privvies.”

Emily Chung is a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP), which has been busting myths about family, sex, marriage and work in English history for over 60 years. Her PhD is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

 

Reference

Emily Chung, ‘Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester’, The Historical Journal (2025). DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X25101246

 

Notes to editors

* Friedrich Engels’ journal entries became The Condition of the Working-Class in England (published in German in 1844) and Manchester had a major influence on his political views, fueling his opposition to the bourgeoisie. He was not alone in portraying Manchester as a city where different classes lived apart and rarely interacted. In 1841, Canon Richard Parkinson decried that there was ‘no town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed’.

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Journal

The Historical Journal

DOI

10.1017/S0018246X25101246 

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester

Article Publication Date

21-Oct-2025

Spinning, no. 6 from JR Barfoot's The Progress of Cotton (1840). In this period, Manchester was the centre of the cotton industry and referred to as 'Cottonopolis'. Before the introduction of labour reforms, many of Manchester’s semi- and unskilled workers put in twelve-hour days, six days a week, trapping them inside while wealthier people were free to move around the city, working, shopping and socialising.



A depiction of St Peter's Church and the Theatre Royal on Peter Street, Manchester, around 1855. At this time, Manchester's streets were rarely occupied by rich and poor at the same time. The cultural and recreational habits of the city’s different classes reinforced their segregation. Manchester’s middle classes were increasingly drawn to church while the city’s 600 pubs had a far greater pull on the working classes.



Union Street Mill, Ancoats, Manchester. Engraving by John McGahey after Samuel Austin, 1835. Emily Chung found that even in Ancoats, the main working-class slum in Manchester, around 10% of the population belonged to the wealthier employed classes.

Credit
Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries





Historian Emily Chung stood in front of a Victorian building. Emily Chung is a PhD researcher at St John's College, Cambridge and a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP), which has been busting myths about family, sex, marriage and work in English history for over 60 years.

Credit
Guillaume Proffit

 

Female bodybuilders at risk of sudden cardiac death

European Society of Cardiology

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Sudden cardiac death is responsible for an unusually high proportion of deaths in female bodybuilders worldwide, according to research published in the European Heart Journal [1] today (Tuesday).

 

Sudden cardiac death is when someone dies suddenly and unexpectedly due to a problem with their heart. It is generally rare in young and seemingly healthy individuals.

 

The study found the greatest risk among women competing professionally. It also revealed a high proportion of deaths from suicide and homicide among female bodybuilders.

 

This is the first large-scale study to systematically investigate deaths in female competitive bodybuilders, and it was led by Dr Marco Vecchiato from the University of Padova, Italy. He said: “Bodybuilders, both female and male, often engage in extreme training, and use fasting and dehydration strategies to achieve extreme physiques. Some also take performance-enhancing substances. These strategies can take a serious toll on the heart and blood vessels.”

 

“Over recent years, more and more women have taken up strength training and competitive bodybuilding. Despite this growing participation, most of the available research and media attention has focused exclusively on male athletes. After publishing our previous study on mortality in male bodybuilders, we realised there was a striking lack of data on female athletes in the same field.” [2]

 

The researchers gathered the names of 9,447 female bodybuilders from the official competition records and from an unofficial online database. All the women had participated in at least one International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation event between 2005 and 2020.

 

The researchers then searched for reports of deaths of any of these named competitors in five different languages across different web sources including official media reports, social media, bodybuilding forums and blogs. Any reported deaths were then cross-referenced using multiple sources and these reports were verified and analysed by two clinicians to establish, as far as possible, the cause of death.

 

The researchers found 32 deaths among the women, with an average age at death of around 42 years. Sudden cardiac death was the most common cause of death, accounting for 31% of deaths. The risk of sudden cardiac death was more than 20 times higher among professional bodybuilders, compared to amateurs.

 

These results indicate that the risk of sudden cardiac death seems much higher is women bodybuilders compared to other professional athletes, although it is lower than the risk for male bodybuilders.

 

Suicide or homicide accounted for 13% of deaths, four times higher than in male bodybuilders. “This striking difference suggests that, beyond cardiovascular risks, female athletes in this field may face unique psychosocial pressures, possibly linked to body image expectations, performance-enhancing substance use, or the extreme demands of the sport,” Dr Vecchiato said.

 

The researchers acknowledge that the study is based on a web-based search strategy, which could have influenced their findings. For example, some deaths, especially among less-known athletes, may have gone unreported. They also found that that autopsy data were available for only a small proportion of cases, meaning that sudden deaths had to be classified based on clinical interpretation rather than confirmed forensic findings.

 

Dr Vecchiato said: “For female bodybuilders, this research is a reminder that the pursuit of extreme muscularity and leanness, while often celebrated, may come at a cost to health, particularly cardiovascular health. Awareness of these risks is essential to promote safer training practices, informed decision-making, and a more health-oriented approach to competitive bodybuilding.

 

“We also need a shift in the sport’s culture, to raise awareness of the risks, not only within the professional ranks, but also in the broader community of women engaging in high-intensity strength training.

 

“For clinicians, especially those working in sports medicine and sports cardiology, these findings underscore the need for proactive screening and counselling, even in young and seemingly healthy female athletes. These individuals may not perceive themselves as at risk, but the data suggest otherwise.”

 

Dr Vecchiato and his team are now studying the health outcomes for athletes across the different historical eras of bodybuilding to see whether changing practice has had an impact on the causes and rates of deaths.

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Journal

European Heart Journal

DOI

10.1093/eurheartj/ehaf789 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Mortality in female bodybuilding athletes

Article Publication Date

21-Oct-2025