Cell phones to the rescue: garment workers finally speak up

When newly recruited garment workers receive their first pay, the first thing they buy for themselves - after contributing to family expenses - is a cell phone. It keeps them connected to friends and family and can even mean better job opportunities. Thus today, mobile phone penetration has reached more than 90 percent in developing countries. Reason enough for mobile phone providers to offer services that let garment workers use their cell phone to anonymously report issues like child labour, delayed wages, long work hours and trafficking.

For international buyers sourcing their garments in places from Turkey to Bangladesh, the system provides an early warning about problems onsite that otherwise may not get addressed. It also alerts them to problems that they could not have foreseen due to cultural differences and being physically far away from the factories.

"One of the big challenges for companies in locations far from their suppliers is: How do you hear from workers directly?" confirmed Sarah Labowitz, co-director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at the NYC Stern School of Business in New York. "When it comes to issues such as discrimination, harassment and abuse, workers have a role in flagging these problems. And as with a lot of social problems, we often look to technology for solutions," she said when speaking to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Without having to actually speak - an important aspect when having no or little privacy - workers can simply press buttons for the issue they want to report, for example 1 for child labour, 2 for delayed wages. In this manner, they can also answer surveys, pressing 1 for "yes" and 2 for "no". Two US-based companies, LaborLink and LaborVoices, specialise in surveys that ask questions like 'Are you being treated fairly?', 'Are wages paid on time?', 'Are fire exits locked?', 'Have you seen a child worker?'.

California-based LaborVoices provides global brands and their supply chains with an early warning system based on direct feedback from workers. According to director Ayush Khanna, its analysis of calls from more than 5,000 workers in Bangladesh in the first half of the year showed that almost a fifth of factories had a "high risk" of child labor. "The system gets around many of the limitations of traditional audits, which are slow, occasional and may be inaccurate because workers are afraid," he said.

The good thing is that things are changing and that most garment workers in traditional sourcing countries like Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam and others have at least one helpline they can avail of to address grievances - a vast improvement from pre-Rana Plaza days when workers were not even sure of their right to speak up.

The Bangladeshi helpline 0800 44 55 000, run by the Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments with the support of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Norwegian government, was available upon its launch in March 2015 to workers in garment factories in Ashulia only, one of the garment hubs around the capital Dhaka. Once it proved successful, it was extended to workers across the country.

Prior to that, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (Alliance) established a worker helpline in 2014, which initially included 50 factories and was then extended.

However, though compiling grievances is a first step and can be a first warning system for many issues, appropriate steps have to be taken to remedy the situation. And this is where technology's reach ends and old-fashioned means of action are required: communication between the different stakeholders involved, locally and internationally, to ensure that an effective long-term solution can be found.

Photo: Labor Link