Up to 90 per cent of workers in Southeast Asia could face unemployment due to automation. Jobs of nearly 90 per cent of garment and footwear workers in Cambodia and Vietnam are at risk from automated assembly lines.

There are nine million people, mostly young women, dependent upon jobs in textiles, garments, and footwear within the Asean economic area, which includes Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. These are the workers most susceptible to losing their jobs.

Garment workers already tend to be low waged, overworked and susceptible to injury from lung ailments, to lost fingers, to being killed in fires and factory collapses. Adding to this list is now the risk of being replaced by faster, cheaper and less rebellious robots.

Companies are attracted to automated technology because of competitive pricing and quality, and by the mitigation of reputational risk. But for the millions of people who stitch clothes and shoes for a living, and who look set to be hardest hit by automation, robots could be an opportunity for fairer work. In a best case scenario, robots take on board the most repetitive, mundane and non-cognitive tasks of apparel manufacturing. Robots would also assume more of the dangerous tasks like mixing of chemicals.