Sri Lanka garment workers learn to speak up

A group of ETI members organised training for over 5,000 Sri Lankan garment workers and the distribution of over 17,000 worker awareness-raising brochures. Workers learned about ethical trade and their rights as workers, and gained confidence in speaking up about their issues.

Training garment workers in their rights

Most workers in global garment factories aren't used to being asked what their issues and priorities are at work, and are unaware that many of the people who buy the clothes they make actually care about how they are treated at work.

ETI's Sri Lanka garment sector project experimented with different approaches to auditing workers' conditions, to find out which produced the most accurate picture. To test the theory that better-informed workers helped generate more accurate findings, they organised training for around 5,000 workers in three of Sri Lanka's largest garment factories.

Workers were trained about their rights as workers and what to expect from workplace audits. A key message was the importance of speaking honestly and freely during audits, but the trainers soon found that it enough of a challenge to get workers to speak openly during the training itself. A project group member said, "At the end of the first training session, workers were asked to raise their hands if they wanted to ask questions. A few did so, but most of them were reluctant to speak up".

To get over their reluctance to talk, in subsequent sessions, workers were asked to write their questions down and pass them forward to the trainer. The new approach was so successful that more questions were generated than was possible to respond to within the training sessions. Instead, answers to the questions that couldn't be covered in the sessions were written up, agreed by the project group and then posted up on worker notice boards at all participating worksites.

Using pictures to make learning accessible

To help get the messages across, our project group produced a cartoon-based awareness-raising brochure, to be distributed to workers in all the factories participating in the experimental audits and used during the training sessions. Illustrations of the different principles of the ETI Base Code and workers being interviewed for audits were used.

Altogether, 5,000 workers in three of Sri Lanka's largest garment factories received training, and the brochure was distributed to a total of 17,000 workers throughout the course of the project.

Workers responded positively to both the training and the brochure. One project group member said "I think it has helped them to know that even if their lives are hard, UK buying companies and Western consumers are sending strong messages to suppliers that they should not be exploited."

According to another group member, "Now, if you say ETI at these factories, all the workers know what that means they should be getting".