Garment workers sweat through record heat with no AC, while cafes fill to capacity

A garment factory in Changsin-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, on Tuesday afternoon, when a major heat alert was in effect for the city. With no air conditioning, workers rely on a single electric fan to get through the day. [Kim Seo-hyeon]

At 2 p.m. Tuesday, as a major heat alert blanketed all of Seoul, cutter Park Jung-hun, 58, moved briskly between bolts of fabric inside a first-floor cutting room at a garment factory in Changsin-dong, Jongno-gu, measuring lengths of cloth. The low-ceilinged workspace — barely 33 square meters — was packed floor to wall with rolls of material.

The only cooling device for the two workers at the cutting table was a single battered green electric fan. "There's so much dust flying off the fabric that we can't use an air conditioner at all," Park said. "Even though I wipe the fan every day, it turns gray with dust." No air conditioner had been installed in the cutting room. Sweat ran continuously from his forehead and the back of his neck, yet he could not remove his thick black cotton mask: every cut sends fine textile fibers into the air, and prolonged exposure to such dust causes byssinosis, an occupational respiratory disease common among textile workers.

In the roughly 66-square-meter basement sewing room below, six piece-rate workers shared a single air conditioner set to 26 degrees Celsius. With no ventilation and fabric stacked throughout, the felt temperature was considerably higher. "We're not salaried employees — there's no set break time," said Kim, 61, one of the workers. "I try to step outside for a moment, but it's so hot out there that I can't rest anyway. The sewing room is actually better." The workers typically put in shifts from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. After 14 hours on the job, their backs were soaked through with sweat.

Midsummer is traditionally the slow season for the garment industry, and this year record heat has compounded the slump by discouraging outings and cutting clothing purchases, further reducing orders for ready-to-wear garments, according to workers at the scene. Lee Jin-gu, 52, a piece-rate worker at another nearby factory, said Dongdaemun clothing merchants began shifting production to China and other overseas suppliers more than a decade ago. "On top of that, the heat keeps shrinking the work, and competition among piece-rate workers has gotten fierce lately," he said. "Because we only earn what we finish, we have no choice but to keep working without a break, no matter how hot it gets."

A banchan shop inside Changsin-dong Market in Jongno-gu, Seoul, on Tuesday afternoon. Bottles of frozen water sit on top of the side-dish containers and two electric fans run continuously to keep the food from spoiling in the heat. [Kim Seo-hyeon]

The double burden weighing on the manufacturing alleyways has spread to the surrounding markets. As nearby garment factories and small manufacturers have closed one by one, the markets have lost their regular customers — and now record heat is driving away foot traffic as well. Yun Mi-hyang, 64, who has run a banchan shop in Changsin-dong Market for a decade, said this summer has been the worst she can remember. "I thought I'd ended up in Africa," she said. "Customers are down, but the money going out just keeps growing."

She added a second electric fan in front of her display last month — up from one — to keep heat from settling on the side dishes, and placed frozen water bottles on top of the banchan containers. She also changed her cooking schedule: instead of preparing a full day's supply in the morning, she now cooks in two batches, morning and afternoon, to prevent food from spoiling in the heat. That has meant paying a staff member extra for the additional work. Food waste has climbed to at least 20 liters a day — roughly double the same period last year. "It's so hot and business is so bad that I want to hand the shop over as soon as possible, but these days there's no one left who wants to run their own business," she said.

Fruit and vegetable stalls, which must keep their storefronts fully open, generally had no air conditioning at all. One fruit shop owner in Changsin-dong said the daytime worker was suffering so badly from the heat that she told him to prop the refrigerator door half open while he worked. "Business is bad and I'm worried about the electricity bill, but that's still better than someone collapsing," she said.

Vendors at Dongdaemun Comprehensive Market were also struggling. Accessory supply shops had seen a brief uptick in sales of craft materials last year, riding a trend of decorating pens, shoes and slippers, but customer traffic has fallen again this summer. "Even if you buy the materials, there's nowhere inside the market to actually work on them — you have to find a cafe or somewhere else," one accessory supplier said. "With the weather this hot, fewer people seem willing to buy supplies and then move somewhere else to work."

The cost of cooling an entire large shopping complex — reflected in management fees — adds another layer of pressure. As long as a shop is open, the building's air conditioning cannot be switched off, even if only one customer is inside. "Customers are down, but the war keeps pushing up the price of imported materials and cooling costs," the vendor said. "There are so many shops selling similar products that we can't just raise prices on our own."

The hardware and tile district around Euljiro 4-ga Station in Jung-gu was equally quiet. A slump in the real estate market has already cut construction activity, and the extreme heat has pushed project schedules back further, reducing orders for building materials. "Summer is normally slow, but I've never seen it this dead," said one tile shop owner. "Since last month, there are plenty of days when not a single customer walks in all day." He added that the real estate market has frozen completely, cutting into construction work itself, and that the heat on top of everything else is making this the hardest summer he has faced.

Park, 49, who runs a hardware store, said import prices have been rising since last year because of the war and inflation, and now the heatwave has wiped out what little customer traffic remained. "It's a brutal double hit," he said. Because he never knows when a customer might walk in, he keeps the air conditioner running throughout business hours — meaning electricity bills arrive every month even when sales are near zero.

Park said one-off cash subsidies — for cooling costs or inventory purchases — are not enough to weather a prolonged downturn. "It would help if small-business loans were at least easier to get at a time like this, but borrowing has become harder too," he said. "There's no sign that sales will recover, and the outgoings just keep piling up. I don't know what to do."

A large cafe in Jung-gu, Seoul, packed to its 60-seat capacity on Tuesday afternoon as residents seek refuge from the heat. [Kim Seo-hyeon]

Cafes, by contrast, were reaping a windfall as residents flooded in to escape the heat. A cafe in Euljiro was packed to all 60 seats on a weekday afternoon, with a line stretching back from the counter. "July sales were up more than 30 percent from June," a cafe representative said. "Cooling costs have gone up too, but the extra revenue more than covers it." Lee Jae-hun, 35, walked in drenched in sweat after waiting outside for a taxi before a client meeting. Even standing briefly on the street had left him perspiring heavily. "I ordered a drink just to sit somewhere cool for a few minutes," he said.

Ice cream and shaved-ice specialty shops — long regarded as a fading trend — also got a boost from the heat. A staff member at a shaved-ice franchise in Jung-gu said that after the format's peak popularity in the 2010s, the brand had developed an image of being past its prime and summer no longer brought any particular sales lift. "This year it's been noticeably hotter, and sales are clearly up from last summer," the employee said.

The owner of a yogurt ice cream franchise in Jongno-gu told a similar story. After strong sales two years ago, revenue slowed last year amid complaints about rising prices and an oversupply of outlets. "This year, even when dine-in traffic is light, delivery orders never stop, and sales are tracking close to what they were two years ago," the owner said.

Piece-rate garment workers, also known as "missings" (from the Korean rendering of "machine"), are paid by the number of items they complete rather than a fixed salary. They work at garment factories but are not formal employees — in effect a form of special-employment labor.

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