Deep Dive

Heat Mitigation as a Human Right: Effective interventions centering the lived experience of garment workersHeat Mitigation as Whose Sustainability? Implementing EU Supply Chain Due Diligence from Global South Perspectives Human Right: Effective interventions centering the lived experience of garment workers

ORGANIZED BY

UC Berkeley, Green Bangla Garments Workers Federation, HeatWatch

16-Sep

09:00-09:45

Conference Room 3

This session focused on heat stress is timely and urgent because temperatures across the globe are rising sharply, transforming heat from a silent disaster into a central climate and public health crisis, making extreme heat a systems-level pressure on labor.

Topic in Focus

How can we best highlight interventions that have been developed by worker organizations in South Asia to address the urgent issue of heat stress in factories and co-create a path forward with other stakeholders?

Overview

Heat is not just a workplace safety hazard; it has become a systems-level pressure on labor. This session will bring the perspective of garment workers who are primarily affected by heat stress in their daily lives and help us understand which interventions can be the most effective in addressing this. This session addresses two challenges: 1) Many brands focus on long term climate goals and these, while important, do not focus on the urgent issue of heat stress in the garment supply chain. There are worker-led solutions to addressing excessive heat that are practical, effective, and implementable that need to be highlighted. 2) Rather than focusing on top-down solutions, this session emphasizes interventions that center the experiences of rightsholders.

Why it matters

This session focused on heat stress is very timely and urgent because temperatures across the globe are rising sharply, transforming heat from a silent disaster into a central climate and public health crisis. Heat is not just a workplace safety hazard; it has become a systems-level pressure on labor.

Who should attend?

Business, Civil Society Organizations, Workers, Government, Researchers

What participants will gain

An appreciation of the harmful effects of heat stress on workers’ health and on working conditions.
An understanding of actionable interventions that can be implemented by stakeholders to reduce the impact of excessive heat.
A concrete plan of next steps on how to engage productively on this issue with other key stakeholders

Apekshita Varshney

Founder and Executive Director, HeatWatch

Apekshita Varshney is the Founder and Executive Director of HeatWatch, a nonprofit working to advance equitable climate adaptation for heat-exposed and marginalized communities in India. She brings over a decade of experience working across media, governments, international nonprofits, and multilateral institutions including UNDP. Her work spans the intersections of urban development, labour rights, corporate accountability and climate resilience. Varshney holds a Masters from University College London where she was a Commonwealth scholar.

Sanchita Saxena

Senior Academic Fellow, Berkeley Center for Law and Business, University of California at Berkeley

Dr. Sanchita Banerjee Saxena holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and has over 25 years of experience working on issues related to business and labor in global supply chains, with a special focus on the garment industry in Asia. At the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Saxena teaches classes about social sustainability and she is also a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) and a Senior Academic Fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Business. She is also a Senior Advisor to Article One, a specialized strategy and management consultancy with expertise in human rights, responsible innovation, and sustainability where she advises companies on responsible supply chains. For more information, please visit sanchitasaxena.com.

Sultana Begum

President, Green Bangla Garments Workers Federation

Mrs. Sultana Begum is the President of the Green Bangla Garments Workers Federation (GBGWF) and a prominent women trade union leader in Bangladesh’s garment sector. With more than three decades of experience in the industry, she began her journey as a child labourer and later became a grassroots organiser and trade union activist. Over the years, Sultana has worked to advance workers’ rights, decent wages, workplace safety, gender equality, and women’s leadership in the garment industry. Her trade union activities have included organising workers and advocating for better working conditions, despite facing significant personal and professional challenges.

Thivya Rakini

Independent consultant

Thivya Rakini is the former State President of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU), an independent, women-led trade union in India. She currently works as an independent consultant, collaborating with brands, suppliers and worker organisations to develop practical solutions to labour and climate-related challenges in global supply chains. Her work focuses particularly on gender, industrial relations, worker voice and building approaches that are scalable, evidence-based and grounded in workers’ experiences.