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Paper short abstract

Analysing climate-related health inequalities in Indonesia’s garment sector, this paper argues that existing labour arrangements enable the strain of extreme weather to be placed on workers’ bodies. Hence, equitable climate futures require attending to power asymmetries embedded in labour relations.

Paper long abstract

The global garment industry is a major contributor to carbon emissions. Ironically, extreme weather now affects production in this sector adversely. In Indonesia’s export processing zones, rising temperatures and increasingly unpredictable rainfall patterns have direct material consequences for garment workers: Flooded streets and factories threaten workers’ health through accidents and exposure to pathogens; heat inside factories exacerbates bodily stress and renders production targets harder to fulfil. Climate-induced extreme weather thus intensifies the already harmful conditions of sweatshop work. This could be solved through changes to drainage and cooling infrastructure; but instead, workers are forced to endure dangerous conditions. Further, the low wages paid for garment work do not allow workers to access sufficient health care or flood-safe housing. Demanding improvements or staying home during heavy rain usually mean risking one’s job, but some unions are taking up climate-related concerns into their work.

Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork with garment workers and labour organisers in Indonesia’s export-oriented garment industry, I argue, firstly, that the effects of climate-related extreme weather for workers’ health are inextricably bound up with the highly precarious labour relations workers are embedded in. Secondly, I contend that recognition of labour relations as central to the experience of climate change, and in turn changes in weather as relevant to the experience of labour, have to be key to the design of just climate futures. If power and material inequalities embedded in exploitative labour regimes are not addressed, exposure to climate change will continue to exacerbate societal inequalities.