Rama Devi (name changed), a 33-year-old garment worker in Gurugram’s Udyog Vihar, has a packed schedule six days a week. She wakes up at 6 a.m., gets her three children ready for school, packs lunch for her family and manages to reach the factory at 9 a.m. Her work station is on the fourth floor, the top-most in the building, where at least 400 workers sit glued to their sewing machines for 8-12 hours a day, barring a 30-minute lunch break. For every eight machines, a garment presser works on finalised garments.

A tailor for 12 years, Rama Devi finds summers particularly difficult due to the heat, made worse by tin roofing, known for higher indoor temperatures compared to cement- or slab-roofed structures. However, she has no means of knowing the actual temperature on the factory floor without a recording device.

“We get headaches and rashes around the neck. Women regularly faint. Even our phones get hot,” says 31-year-old Sameeta (name changed), another garment worker in Gurugram. Facing intense pressure to complete 60 pieces an hour, workers like Rama Devi and Sameeta tolerate the discomfort and continue stitching.

Workers’ welfare is covered under Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions or OSH code, 2020, one of the four labour codes rolled out on November 21, 2025. Experts say these codes have a blindspot for changing climate, as we explained in the first part of this series.

Workers can experience heat stress through a combination of environmental and metabolic factors. These factors increase heat storage in the body, leading to heat-related illnesses such as heat rash, oedema (swelling of hands, feet and ankles), muscle cramps, spasms of the feet and hands, syncope, exhaustion, and heat stroke, according to a government factsheet.

The factsheet was part of a public health advisory for 2026, which called on employers to provide cool drinking water, shaded work areas, hourly rest breaks, assign additional workers or slow down the pace of work, install temperature and forecast displays at the workplace, and train and inform workers on symptoms and protections.

Workers in garment units, glass factories and small workshops often labour for long hours in poorly ventilated, heat-trapping spaces where temperatures can be as severe as those outdoors, a 2026 report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a nonprofit, noted.

Even at lower temperatures, humid heat can start to show adverse health impacts. Research shows that the combined effect of temperature higher than 32°C and humidity beyond 60% is hazardous for the human body, as ISignal explained in May 2025.

Garment manufacturing units frequently exceed the standards for wet-bulb globe temperature—28°C for moderate work and 25°C for heavy work—a 2026 report by HeatWatch noted.

Many workers living in overcrowded homes with tin or tarpaulin roofs do not get respite at home either, affecting their recovery before the next working day.

In this second of a four-part series, we examine how climate change impacts working conditions and wages of women workers in two sectors: garment industry, where women make up more than 50% of those employed in the apparel and textile sector, and automotive and auto component manufacturing industry, where women constitute 8.7% of the workforce.

We have reached out to the Ministry of Labour and Employment as well as state labour departments in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, and Karnataka for comment. We will update this report when we receive a response.

“While the old [labour] laws had relatively better provisions for workers, they were not properly implemented. So, many workers, especially women, might not know what they have lost under the new Codes,” explains Akash Bhattacharya, a historian, lawyer and trade unionist based in Delhi.

The OSH code increases the threshold for “factories” from 10 workers with power to 20, and 20 workers without power to 40, as we explained in the first part of this series. The government has clarified that health, safety and welfare workers’ rights protection is applicable to establishments having 10 or more employees.

However, the Code states that the Union government “may” prescribe standards for providing on issues such as ventilation, temperature and humidity, potable drinking water, and prevention of overcrowding, and tasks employers of “factories” with maintaining health, safety and working conditions.

These thresholds exclude smaller establishments. For example, in 2021-22, garment factories employed 1.2 million workers across India, but factory workers account for less than 10% of the total employment in the garment industry, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi noted in a 2024 paper. “The rest of the garment workers were attached to micro, small, and household-based enterprises (with less than 10 workers in each),” they wrote. The industry is also an important source of employment for women, accounting for 37.8% of the female manufacturing workforce in the country in 2021-22.

“These thresholds significantly swing the balance in favour of the employer. The Codes have come in a policy climate in which the ease of doing business is trumping basic rights of people,” Bhattacharya explains.

Dhanraj B., senior manager, advocacy at Safe in India (SII), a nonprofit, explains that women perform substantially the same risky production tasks as men in the auto component manufacturing units, with heavy manual lifting being the main exception. They typically work with high-risk machinery such as power presses, tools that are designed to shape, shear, punch, bend, and form metal.

Power press machines, which can cause crush injuries and lead to amputations, account for the largest share (74%) of serious crush injuries in Haryana (2019 - 2025) and Maharashtra (2022 - 2025), according to Crushed 2026, SII’s annual report on the Indian automotive........

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