According to a recent story at Fortune, Levi’s is currently in the midst of an “ambitious experiment to improve the lives of the 25 million men and women in the world’s supply chain.”
The “Improving Worker Well-Being” initiative (a name that sounds like it fell down a flight of stairs, but it’s the thought that counts) aims to get the fashion industry to “recognize that workers aren’t faceless cogs in giant profit machines, but people with feelings and needs.”
Levi’s has been behind several factory-worker-friendly initiatives in the past — Fortune ranked them No. 11 on their “Change the World” list this year — but this project is far more enterprising than previous efforts. “This is about creating a culture that embraces well-being,” Kim Almeida, who heads the program, told Fortune. “It’s a mindset shift.”
While the program, which involves a 10-week course “designed to teach [factory employees] about health, hygiene and sanitation, as well as communication and critical thinking,” doesn’t have any empirical data to prove its vitality as of yet, at least one factory president is “optimistic” that it might help to “reduce the plant’s stubbornly high 30% to 40% annual turnover rate.”
And that’s the real kicker with this program: everybody wins. The goal of the program isn’t just to employ “happier, healthier employees [with] lower rates of costly absenteeism and turnover,” it’s also trying to parlay those things into a “network of more productive, better-run factories.”
Mandatory for all Levi’s vendors by 2020, the initiative has already been embraced by key suppliers throughout the supply chain. And though it doesn’t necessarily address any wage concerns — “higher wages didn’t top the list of priorities in employee surveys,” the story claims, adding that “Levi’s [says] that health, financial inclusion, harassment, and discrimination tend to rank higher” — it does seem to make a serious impact on the lives of factory workers.
You can read more about it at Fortune.
