The cost of cooling Bangladesh’s garment factories—and, by extension, their workers—isn’t as exorbitant as it might seem, a new report has found. Engineering studies commissioned by Cornell University’s ILR Global Labor Institute found that passive and active cooling measures carried manageable costs for most of the factories they examined, with average payback periods of one to four years through recovered worker productivity and reduced downtime.
The findings, part of a first-of-its-kind analysis, reframe extreme heat from a seemingly intractable burden borne by those at the lowest rungs of the supply chain into a solvable operational challenge that shared-financing structures can begin to address. By splitting the investment among brands, factory owners and concessional climate funds, the report argues, the cost to each party becomes less daunting.
Who should pay to protect workers has become a topic of intense contention as companies tighten their purse strings amid unprecedented supply-chain volatility, Sarah Krasley, a visiting fellow at Cornell University’s ILR Global Labor Institute and one of the report’s co-authors, said during a webinar on Monday.
Yet the need to act has never been more urgent. Bangladesh’s historical “six-season” climate cycle has effectively shifted into a prolonged, seven-month heat-stress season that runs from early April through late October. Across the eight Dhaka-area Tier 1 factories examined, the highest wet-bulb globe temperature readings—a measure that accounts for air temperature, humidity and radiant heat—occurred during the late-monsoon period of damp, humid heat when sweat evaporation is less effective.
On average, indoor factory conditions were 1.4 degrees Celsius higher on the wet-bulb globe temperature scale than outdoor conditions during the heat-stress season, the ILR Global Labor Institute found. The risks are commensurate with the physical demands of the job. Workers in higher-exertion roles near heat-generating equipment, such as ironing and finishing, can spend more than eight hours of a typical workday in high or severe heat-stress conditions that trigger heightened physiological strain. The additional rest and recovery that heat stress requires translated into a 4.1 percent average loss in productivity at participating factories, the report said.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to cooling factories, technology isn’t the barrier, said Jason Judd, the ILR Global Labor Institute’s executive director and another study co-author. Engineering options, ranging from thermal insulation and realigned ventilation to targeted mechanical cooling and energy-efficiency retrofits, are readily available and well understood. Instead, the challenges are mostly political, he said.
One hurdle is a regulatory gap. While Bangladesh’s labor law requires “adequate ventilation” and “comfortable temperatures” for workers, it sets no specific temperature limits or heat-stress thresholds. Nor does providing factories with guidance or embedding heat standards in voluntary private regulation guarantee the necessary investments.
“Mandates, not maybes,” he said, calling for binding heat-stress protocols to be incorporated directly into the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry and the RMG Sustainability Council framework.
But above all looms the unresolved question of who will foot the bill—not unlike current discussions over the cost of decarbonizing the supply chain. At the individual-facility level, upfront costs range from $61,000 to $265,000, or roughly $9.85 per square meter, while annual operating costs average just $0.63 per square meter.
Across Bangladesh’s apparel export industry, the study estimates that remediating high heat would require $239 million in capital expenditure—roughly 0.2 percent of the country’s 2025 apparel export revenue if spread over three years. Judd called that a “very manageable number,” albeit one that should not be viewed as a manufacturer-only expense. The case for distributing costs among brands, suppliers and government is “double true” for the thousands of small, low-margin producers that make up the majority of Bangladesh’s garment industry, he added.
Even so, cooling the factory floor is only half the equation. The ILR Global Labor Institute also tracked temperatures in 37 workers’ homes, where corrugated iron or tin roofs and poor ventilation trap heat indoors, offering little relief at night. As a result, workers experience just as much heat stress at home as they do on the production line.
Outside the factory, the business case becomes harder to make: home cooling and other adaptations don’t deliver the same measurable productivity gains that can help offset capital expenditures. That makes a factory-centered response incomplete, Judd said. The most effective adaptation, by his reckoning, is ensuring that workers earn enough to protect themselves beyond the factory gates—a need highlighted by continuing protests over what many say is a woefully inadequate minimum wage.
“The one way and the most adaptive technology available is wages—and living wages—that allow workers to make the kinds of investments in energy, electricity for their homes, for efficient fans, for the medicines that help power them through these hot months, and perhaps most importantly, for homes that help them escape the worst of the high heat-stress season,” he said.
No matter how the question of who pays ultimately plays out, one point is obvious: Workers shouldn’t be left shouldering the consequences. As temperatures continue to rise, however, so do reports of heat-related ailments, including headaches, dizziness, fatigue, muscle cramps and fainting.
“Going to work should not make them sick,” said Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. “And when workers are sick, they should be treated as human beings, not a production problem. You cannot tell workers to drink water and rest while still demanding 120 to 154 pieces an hour. I’m not talking about a day; it is per hour. When heat increases, workloads must adjust.”
