Laborlink Bangladesh Collaborative
New worker insights around factory interventions with key recommendations for improving workplace communication and safety in garment factories.
With financial support from C&A Foundation, Laborlink implemented a two-year, multi-brand collaborative program to better understand and address, from the worker’s perspective, some of the underlying causes for poor working conditions in Bangladesh’s garment factories.
Between July 2015 and August 2017, the Laborlink Bangladesh Collaborative (LBC) program used mobile technology to collect anonymous feedback from 53,203 workers across two separate survey modules: Workplace Safety and Workplace Communications.
In total, nearly 130 baseline and follow-up surveys were completed across 40 factories that supply to American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), C&A, or Tesco.
Four recommendations for turning worker insights into action:
- Workplace Communications: Implement more trainings and eLearnings to improve worker-management relationships and reduce the prevalence of abusive language in your factory.
- Grievance Mechanisms: Build awareness on how to use factory grievance mechanisms and communicate all follow-up actions to inform workers of how complaints are being addressed.
- Workplace Safety: Increase safety protocol communications so workers understand what actions are being taken by management to create safe and healthy working conditions.
- Worker Engagement: Continue engaging with workers to identify new improvement opportunities, and leverage their feedback when designing, implementing, and measuring improvement actions.