This time of year is typically when greetings are sent out with wishes for a new and better year. Along with our heartfelt wishes, we at WethicA are sending along solid and positive news of hope in our CSR outlook for 2009.
Happy new year! Why you may ask are we so excited about 2009? Recent strides in social compliance have given us great cause for hope in the New Year and we want to share with everyone.
With 1.3 billion residents, it is only obvious we start with China. Recently, during an audit, a factory manager explained how he was successfully managing his factory fully compliant abiding by Chinese laws. So accustomed to hearing such statements in our line of work, we were naturally not very convinced at the beginning.
This factory manufactures assembly components for mass market production. The factory owner told us his workers hardly ever need to work overtime, that is, no more than 10 hours in a month. By only employing workers from the local area - mainly women with young children unwilling to put in long hours - the factory is able to keep workers from committing overtime. Neither was there any complaints regarding compensation from the workers as minimum wage was guaranteed including proper overtime pay, making the overall wages similar to common Chinese factories. Implementing an efficient production system that allows better productivity, higher reactivity and reduced wastes partly compensates the cost difference. Increasing productivity with employee incentives based on strong individual follow-up to ensure both schedules and targets defined by past capacity are met is a key example. Charging higher prices promising better service is another key factor in the factory being able to meet compliant standards. Strong partnerships with his buyers and better service beat out the lower prices of his competitors, keeping his business sustainable and profitable for years to come.
Shifting to Bangladesh, our auditor, Daly, has met great success with her innovative worker training programs. The goal of these trainings is to train workers on the basics of health and safety and worker’s rights. Devising creative ways to reach her audience, largely illiterate and impoverished, she puts on short skits where she and her team performs in the street in front of factories during their lunch breaks. These skits act real-life factory situations centering on workers’ plight, and provide solutions to empower and educate workers. The video clip below despite being recorded in Bengali shows how innovative and effective this tool is to training the workers in the garment industry of their rights and of health and safety basics. Interested in learning how this could benefit your own factories or your suppliers’ factories? Please contact us for more information, and we will forward your request to Daly.
In Indonesia and Vietnam, we have been impressed by new investment to meet the highest standard of workers’ safety in the garment industry. What is very interesting here is companies in countries with much less media focus on CSR issues than China or Bangladesh are also beginning to invest in this area. Below are photos of a few factories in these countries.
Recently, in an audit in China, a factory turned over real work time records after we uncovered the ones they had presented us were fake. This is a notable achievement - factories never willingly admit to faking records even after we present them with evidence of their deceit. This factory finally convinced by our auditors it was counterproductive to show fake ones, especially since they were listed as among the good factories and were already implementing improvements. Slowly but surely, our auditing approach is being replaced by our improvement approach. 2008 was a strong year full of audits, but our hope is for 2009 to be a strong year of improvements where WethicA spends more effort on supporting factories in building sustainability.
Once again, we wish you a wonderful and prosperous year. Bring in the year of improvement 2009 with joy and good cheer!
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