“Almost every day [in the hot season] in our factory, five to seven people faint. Five to seven people just fall down.”
“Sometimes I feel my hand muscles[s] and my leg muscle[s] [are] cramped. And sometimes I vomit. And sometimes my head spins. And a lot of things. I also [get] colds and fevers.”
“I actually avoid drinking more water because of the workload. If I drink too much, I’ll need to use the washroom, which takes time. But I have to complete 150 pieces of work within an hour.”
These are some of the comments made to Cara Schulte by people working in the stifling hot garment factories of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Schulte, a fourth year doctoral student at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and researcher at Climate Rights International, has spent the past two summers in southern Bangladesh and, among other projects, has interviewed more than 50 people whose work has gotten more dangerous due to climate change. Most of the individuals Schulte interviewed worked in clothing factories but others worked in transportation and construction.
“These workers are facing the horrors of climate injustice,” Schulte said. “They are forced to work long hours in factory infernos—without safe water or effective cooling systems—to churn out seasonal trends for buyers in the high-income countries that caused this crisis.”
There is unequivocal evidence that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Experts, including those from the United Nations, note that 2024 was the earth’s hottest year on record—and the years 2014 to 2024 was its warmest decade.
Within this warming planet, low-income countries—where most people can not afford to take adaptive measures like installing air conditioners—suffer the most. Of those nations, Bangladesh is among the hardest hit. Its capital, Dhaka, is uniquely vulnerable to climate impacts due to a combination of the urban heat island effect and its labor-intensive economy.
In addition to a broad spectrum of acute health impacts, Schulte said, “prolonged heat exposure is now being linked to painful and long-term chronic conditions including cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, decreased kidney function, liver damage, depression and suicidality, violence, some cancers, and death.”
A report authored by Schulte, “My Body is Burning: Climate Change, Extreme Heat, and Labor rights in Bangladesh,” was published this summer by Climate Rights International. The research was funded in part by the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies. Her partners on the ground were local researchers Hannan Biswas and Bejoya Islam, and Garment Workers Diaries, an organization which connects researchers to workers around the world. The group recently changed its name to Global Worker Dialogue.
Schulte’s report highlights the very tough conditions that garment workers face in Dhaka, where the hot season often brings temperatures over 100 degrees and humidity levels above 85%. On a record-breaking day in the summer of 2025, the heat index reached nearly 118.
One woman included in Schulte’s report, identified only as Raina, said she worked 10 to 14 hours a day during that summer of record heat, even while seven months pregnant.
“When she fainted,” Schulte wrote, “there was nowhere to rest, so she would simply lay behind her desk for a few minutes and get back to work.”
Schulte’s mentors at Berkeley Public Health include Dr. Ndola Prata, Dr. Rohini Haar, and her advisor, Dr. Laura (Layla) H. Kwong, an assistant professor in Environmental Health Sciences, who has worked in Bangladesh, India, China, Uganda, and other countries. Kwong’s work with the Global Environmental Health Solutions Lab focuses on identifying pathways of disease transmission; developing products and services to reduce exposure to climate change, air pollution, pathogens, and irritants; and evaluating intervention impacts on child health.
As part of Schulte’s fellowship with the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability, and her work with the Global Environmental Health Equity Lab, Schulte is also working with Kwong, Prata, and researchers Sophie Cotton and Blake Erhardt-Ohren on climate change and sexual and reproductive health.
Researcher Cara Schulte in the Adams Street Library in Brooklyn, New York.
Kwong calls Schulte a dynamo.
“I’ve never seen a student more focused on a singular goal, with a clear path and a skillset that she is constantly honing to achieve that goal: Using legal and human rights arguments to help improve the environment that we all depend on,” Kwong said. “I’m extremely grateful to be able to work with her.”
Schulte’s dissertation includes a study of associations between extreme heat and stillbirth, preterm birth, and low birth weight in low and middle income countries. Though analyses are still underway, Schulte and her co-authors estimate that workplace exposure to high versus moderate temperatures was associated with a 3% higher risk of stillbirth and a 9% higher risk of preterm birth. The National Institutes of Health notes that babies born prematurely are at greater risk of death than babies born at full term.
In her recent Bangladesh report, Schulte wrote that inside garment factories, people working in extreme heat are fainting, getting sick, and even dying in extreme temperatures, with little protection from the government, employers, or the multinational corporations that profit from their work. In 2022, Bangladesh’s fashion exports were valued at over USD $31 billion.
Although the U.S., China, Persian Gulf states, and Europe are primarily responsible for the emissions that fueled the climate crisis, she wrote, Bangladesh is among the countries hurt most by its impact.
But, Schulte noted, most of Dhaka’s workforce has little choice but to go along with factory and workplace practices – long hours, intense quotas, limited break time, poverty wages – no matter how difficult or abusive.
When the human body overheats, blood vessels expand and blood flow to the skin increases in an effort to cool down, reducing blood pressure and blood flow to vital organs, including the brain. Heat exposure also increases the risk of dehydration, which reduces blood volume. In combination, these and other factors can lead to dizziness, lightheadedness, and fainting. Most workers Schulte interviewed had either fainted in the heat themselves, or watched a colleague collapse. Several people reported losing consciousness more than once.
Some reported moving and working so slowly that they had to work as much as 50 percent more time to complete their tasks. And others cut shifts short due to heat-related illness, forfeiting much-needed pay. The average garment worker in Dhaka earns the equivalent of about US $80 per month.
“Many workers lacked access to toilets at their worksites, experienced pressures not to use the bathroom frequently, or feared that the water supply at work was unsafe,” Schulte said. “These challenges led some workers to deliberately restrict their water intake so as not to have to use the bathroom as frequently, leading to dehydration and urinary tract infections and increasing their risk of other, more severe heat-related health issues.”
Some companies—including VF Corporation (home of the North Face, Timberland, Dickies, and Vans) and H&M—have embedded heat protections into their supplier codes of conduct, Schulte notes, but enforcement is generally not sufficient.
“Businesses and governments have an obligation to protect workers from the growing threat of extreme heat,” she said. “Employers and multinational corporations should work in tandem with the Bangladesh government to monitor heat safety, protect workers and uphold trier rights. Doing so will be critical to the future of public health, worker well-being and the global economy.”
Schulte, 30, obtained her undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in environmental health science from Johns Hopkins University. In addition to her work at UC Berkeley and with Climate Rights International, she is also a research assistant for the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Climate Change, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, and a rapporteur at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center, among other posts.
She first became interested in heat research while working at Human Rights Watch in 2017. She thought she could make progress on the issue because it would be easy for people to understand and relate to.
“Everyone has had the experience of being too hot,” she said, “so it’s a really visceral, descriptive thing to research. And I felt that there were a lot of paths forward for different things we could do to address heat issues.”
Schulte had heard about labor rights abuses in Bangladesh for a long time, and was influenced by her mentor and supervisor at Climate Rights International, Brad Adams, who was also the former Asia director of Human Rights Law. She also benefitted from Kwong’s network of contacts in Dhaka.
She is pleased that her work straddles the intersection of academia and advocacy.
“Many of my mentors are adjunct professors, where they teach a class or two and then they are also on the board, or directors or have some kind of leadership role at an NGO,” she said. “I like that an academic background can bring a very rigorous methodology to NGO-type research. And NGOs can bring to academia the advocacy side of the issues.”
She is grateful to the workers who spent time talking to her about their lives, and thinks about them often. Asked about the hardest part of her research, Schulte said, “You leave knowing that progress is a long-term goal. So you hear these terrible really terrible stories and testimony from all of these people, and of course the end goal of the research is to make positive change. But you know there is nothing you can really do right now or overnight. That’s challenging. I still think of these people daily.”
“It was an eye-opening experience,” she said. “It was really unbelievably hot. I was wearing a heart rate monitor to test for another project with Kwong, and my resting heart rate was over 100 sometimes. In New York, it’s in the 60s. My body was just fighting to keep up.”
She is pleased that the field of climate change has taken off, since she began studying the subject ten years ago.
“Being at a university as big as UC Berkeley, so well known for its environmental work, is really exciting,” Schulte said. “There are so many resources and so many opportunities, and climate change is impacting so many different things.
“I think there’s a huge opportunity for young researchers to really make a name for themselves—and having the name Berkeley behind you when you‘re doing international work is really exciting and can be really helpful early in your career.”
Schulte’s report comes at a time when municipal governments in the United States—and national and local governments in southern Europe, Japan, and elsewhere around the globe—are enacting laws to protect workers from extreme heat.
Schulte, however, isn’t waiting around.
In September, working with Climate Rights International, and 44 labor, climate change, and sustainable fashion organizations, among others, Schulte helped craft a joint letter calling for heat stress to be recognized as a core safety issue.
The coalition addressed its proposal to the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Garment and Textile Industry—the legally binding agreement between garment brands and trade unions.
“Extreme heat is a preventable threat to occupational safety,” Schulte said. “As a champion of worker health and safety and well-being, the International Accord has an opportunity to protect workers.”
The coalition is pressing the Accord to adopt clear, evidence-based heat protection standards, and has suggested a range of best practices, many of which are included in the World Health Organization guidelines on occupational heat stress.
Proposed measures include maximum heat thresholds above which work must be stopped; return-to-work standards to ensure workers are able to recover following illness; and schedule adjustments to help workers avoid working in peak heat conditions, among other standards. Other important changes would be to include basic human rights provisions, such as better access to bathrooms and potable drinking water.
Climate Rights International is in discussion with affiliates of the Accord.
“People working in occupational health and safety are well-aware that heat is a pressing issue. Brands are the real barrier here. But as the research continues to show how climate change is—and will continue to—impact corporate bottom lines, I think we have a real shot at making a change, increasing protections, and making climate adaptation a reality for workers in high-risk communities.”
