• With Bangladesh witnessing its worst power crisis in a decade, BPO workers have been working from offices with no cooling systems, and going back to homes with no electricity.
• Studies indicate that the extreme heat and humidity in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, is impairing labor productivity, with major losses attributed to “heat stress.”

For two weeks in June, Nawshin Khan, a marketing and content management strategist at Dhaka-based outsourcing firm Datacrete, struggled to stay awake and alert at work. As Bangladesh experienced its longest heatwave in decades, temperatures in Dhaka soared to a 58-year-high of 40.6 degrees Celsius (around 105 degrees Fahrenheit). The capital city faced severe electricity cuts as power plants fell short of meeting a surging demand. Some areas reported load-shedding, or controlled power blackouts, for as long as 10 hours at a stretch.

With no power back at her apartment, Khan could barely get any sleep at night. The 28-year-old didn’t even have the option of sleeping next to an open window “because the air was so hot outside,” she told Rest of World. Despite the sleep deprivation, going to work felt like a respite because “at least there was a generator [in the office] that operated the fans.”

Khan works in Bangladesh’s business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. She is one of around 70,000 workers in an industry to which companies around the world outsource entire business functions — from marketing and payroll to human resources. The BPO industry in Bangladesh has been expanding, with jobs in the sector growing steadily in recent years, according to the Bangladesh Association of Contact Center and Outsourcing. According to local media reports, there were at least 350 BPO firms in the country as of March 2023, with an annual revenue of $700 million in 2022. They support real estate companies, health-care facilities, and law firms in the U.K. and U.S. But the foot soldiers of this industry — BPO workers — are now staring at a disconcerting future as global temperatures continue to rise. Several told Rest of World they’re already weary and exhausted.

“It’s like there’s no air in the room. It’s like the fan isn’t working at all.”

Five hours from Dhaka, in Chattogram, known for its balmy summers with frequent spells of rain, 27-year-old BPO worker Naima Shirmen said the heat has felt like “living hell” this year. “I’ve never seen heat as bad as this in my whole life. I get headaches everyday. I feel sick. I’m not able to sleep at night properly,” she told Rest of World. “And as you know, if you can’t sleep properly, you can’t do work.” Shirmen provides remote marketing support for foreign clients of BPOs in Dhaka.

“The [heat] is so bad this year that when we switch on the fans, it makes no difference,” she said. “It’s like there’s no air in the room. It’s like the fan isn’t working at all.”

According to Shouro Dasgupta, environmental economist at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, heat stress and high heat exposure is already affecting labor supply and productivity across countries like Bangladesh, India, and others in South and Southeast Asia — regions where labor is projected to suffer due to future climate change. Sustainable cooling is the need of the hour, particularly for indoor tech workers, Dasgupta told Rest of World. He believes that governments should step in and work with air-conditioner manufacturers, building operators, and other stakeholders to ensure workers are comfortable.

“[We need] proper ventilation and passive design in workspace whenever possible but also regular breaks, including water breaks for workers,” Dasgupta said. “Energy-efficient air conditioning with improved building design and system management can keep cooling electricity use stable, while also providing economic, health, and environmental benefits.”

When Sadman Mallik’s office in central Dhaka plunged into darkness during the June power cuts, he and members of his team ventured outside, in the unbearable heat, to buy pedestal fans. The small generator in their office wasn’t powerful enough to sustain the load of a central air-conditioning unit, and they only had two fans in the room. Except, the surge in demand for fans had sellers raising prices to more than double. “We also had to buy gallons of diesel to run the generator. These unexpected costs increased our overheads for the month,” Mallik told Rest of World.

Mallik runs a small BPO company with a staff of 15. They set up an office in central Dhaka as recently as 2022. But the 7–8 hours of power cuts, coupled with the high cost of the diesel they used to power generators, inflated their overhead expenditure for the month. “We were not ready for this,” Mallik said.

“Green policies and investments in public infrastructure need to be prioritized to allow equitable access to cooling.”

The extreme heat and humidity in Dhaka also greatly impairs labor productivity, according to a 2022 report published by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. The report projects losses greater than 8% of annual output in Dhaka due to “heat stress” alone — and this number could rise to 10% by 2050. “It’s so hard to live in Dhaka now,” said Datacrete’s Khan. “There’s no clean air, lots of pollution, barely any trees, and traffic.”

While other international cities such as Abu Dhabi or Bangkok are more exposed to heat stress, Dhaka is more vulnerable to the effects of heat due the lack of external cooling devices like air conditioners. But increasing access to air conditioning also bears a steep cost as it leads to an increase in demand for electricity. This, in turn, causes power failures in countries with heavy coal dependency like Bangladesh, noted Dasgupta. “Green policies and investments in public infrastructure need to be prioritized to allow equitable access to cooling,” he said. These policies would include “incentivizing and mandating cool roofs, green roofs and walls, expanding green spaces, reflective streets and pavements, public shading structures, and promoting the use of public transport,” said Dasgupta.

Zayed Ahmed is the founder of ASL BPO, a Bangladeshi outsourcing company providing back-office support to North American clients. He told Rest of World power cuts are holding the country back, and might slow down the pace of job creation in its outsourcing sector. “It has been challenging, not for only us, but also for most of the BPO companies and IT-related companies in Bangladesh because we work for foreign clients, and power cuts multiple times a day [lasting for up to six hours sometimes] are detrimental for the services that we are providing,” said Ahmed.

Mazhab Khan, who runs a digital marketing agency in central Dhaka, meanwhile, has been trying to distract his 20 employees from the heat. When the power cuts struck, Khan — whose agency provides digital advertisements and lead generation services to clients in the U.S. and U.K. — bought fruits. “Mangoes, stuff like that,” he told Rest of World. “Tried to distract [workers] from focusing on the outside weather, gossiped with them in a meeting room.”

“[Distraction] worked for a bit, in the short run, but doesn’t really work long-term,” Khan said. “We’re just trying our best in a crisis.”

Zuha Siddiqui is a Labor x Tech reporting fellow at Rest of World based in Karachi, Pakistan.

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