The face of the global workplace is a woman. Verité launches new programs to support women workers.

Women make up 70 percent of the world’s population living in poverty. Women account for over 85% of the workers in the apparel and footwear sectors alone. Though progress has been made, Verité’s factory monitors continue to uncover, on a daily basis, the obstacles faced by women workers in the global supply chain.

Verité audits have discovered instances of women’s issues in a great majority of factories we’ve audited and researched globally. Specific challenges to women in factories around the world include sexual harassment and abuse, unsafe and unhealthy working environments, employment discrimination, inequitable compensation, and lack of education and community resources.

Recent findings from our monitoring of factories in South Africa are a good example:

• Verbal abuse was found in all factories we audited, as well as significant instances of physical abuse.
• Women are working in excess of the legal weekly limit on work hours. The majority are working 7 days a week and making less than 23 cents an hour.
• Over 20% of workers are illiterate. Many women workers expressed uncertainty about how to access their health benefits, and concern that the skills they are learning in the factory are not transferable to outside work.
• Pregnant women have not been transferred to lighter work as required; some women are forced to take birth control; and women who are pregnant are discriminated against during hiring.

To respond to these and other conditions uncovered in factories abroad, Verité is launching new initiatives designed to empower women factory workers and to increase best practices by employers in the global workplace. We do so in collaboration with our global NGO partners and corporations.

Recently Verité teamed with our partner, SHEVA, a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1991 to support women in Bangladesh, to create and launch an initiative to train women workers and unemployed women. Thanks to support from Levi Strauss & Co., SHEVA, with Verité’s guidance, is now implementing our “Worker Training for Community Impact-A Bangladesh Initiative.” The vision behind this program is to improve labor conditions, as well as the health and socio-economic status of women garment workers in the Kanchpur area of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The program is modeled on Verité’s successful Mobile Worker Training Program in China. For the past 3 years, Verité has conducted worker- and management-trainings at factories employing over 64,000 workers in China, focused on women’s rights, labor law, health, economic self-sufficiency, reproductive rights, nutrition, and HIV/AIDS. Over 90% of the participants have been young women, mostly migrant workers, often living in poverty and at high risk of contracting infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS. The program in Bangladesh will empower women who have weak social safety nets, being new rural migrants into the low-income neighborhoods of suburban Dhaka. Their families live at subsistence level with very little access to healthcare or basic water sanitation. They have limited access to education, economic training, and medical resources for the most common female health problems.

The Worker Training for Community Impact initiative in Bangladesh comprises a joint Mobile Worker Training Program for over 15,000 workers; Operational Training for factory management at senior manager to supervisor levels; and the launch of a Micro-Enterprise program involving 1,200 women connected to workers in the factories and retrenched garment workers in the Kanchpur area of Dhaka, Bangladesh. As Sayeeda Khan, Director of SHEVA and of Verité’s monitoring programs in Bangladesh, says “our efforts are devoted to secure and protect women's rights by implementing programs to help women at work and create avenues for them to enter the world of work.”

The training aims to bring about a holistic and qualitative improvement in the living standard of the urban working poor women. The long-term outcome of the program will be greater economic sustainability and community support for women and their families. The program will empower production workers and their immediate support networks with knowledge that relates both to their personal lives and workplace issues, and to increase the awareness of factory management on social compliance issues.

This initiative is just one tangible example of how Verité works with our global partners to advance economic opportunities for women. Verité’s work throughout the world improves women’s economic and social wellbeing by improving the conditions of the factories, strengthening labor protections and the skills of workers and unemployed factory workers.

It is our hope that this initiative and others like it will result in increased awareness that many challenges in the global economy are essentially women’s issues. Our approach is to create a solutions-driven movement in the workplace to advance women and their families in the global economy. Verité advocates for best practices by employers and we aim for transformational economic and social change within the workplace.

To make a contribution to Verité’s “Global Women Workers Fund” in support of our women’s programs and initiatives, please visit our donation page. Click on the “Global Women Workers Fund” button to allocate your gift: http://www.verite.org/aboutus/contribute.htm