Worker-Wellbeing, Ninh Binh, Vietnam
With financial support from the Levi Strauss Foundation (LSF), the Centre for Promotion of Quality of Life (LIFE Centre), a non-profit organization in Vietnam, has been partnering with Nien Hsing Ninh Binh (NHNB) factory in Vietnam to improve workers’ lives since 2014. During the first LSF grant (2014-2016), the partners aimed to achieve two major goals, improving NHNB workers’ health and their family’s wellbeing and strengthening supervisory skills for NHNB line leaders so as to enhance working relations. WWB areas identified from the worker’s needs assessment included reproductive health, farming-based health issues, financial literacy and savings. The factory also noted the needs to improve supervisory skills of their Vietnamese and Taiwanese supervisors to enhance working relations.
PHASE I
The partners formed and built capacity of 70 NHNB workers (i.e. 2% of 3,400 totally) as WWB supporters who were trained on communication and group facilitation skills, as well as the health topics raised by workers on worm disease, hand-foot-mouth disease, Dengue fever, HIV, and Hepatitis B&C. The project team and WWB collaborators organized eight health seminars and distributed booklets on the above health issues to all NHNB workers. Thirty Taiwanese and Chinese managers and 100 Vietnamese line leaders were equipped with supervisory skills, which was considered a major driver for effective task and people management, reducing work tension and enhancing working relations.
As the result, 93.9% of the interviewed workers during the evaluation reported to have benefited from the project activities. The evaluation showed some modestly positive changes among workers (Table 1).
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Table 1. Comparison of baseline vs evaluation metrics |
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% of workers reported: |
Baseline (N=165) |
Evaluation (N=179) |
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having at least one of their needs addressed by the project |
59.8 |
65.4 |
|
increased awareness of HIV/AIDS prevention and available services |
91.8 |
92.7 |
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increased awareness of Hepatitis B and C and available services |
86.7 |
89.4 |
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increased aware of contraceptive methods |
91.3 |
92.2 |
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improved communication/negotiation skills at work |
88.0 |
88.3 |
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having been able to save money |
76.6 |
78.2 |
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decreased sick-related days-off |
81.6 |
82.1 |
PHASE II
During the period of 2017-2019 (also supported by the LSF), LIFE and the management and WWB team representatives of NHNB planned a number of activities to build NHNB in-house capacity for driving WWB initiatives including, assisting NHNB WWB team to use internet-based survey questionnaire instead of asking workers in person to objectively collect workers’ feedback and suggestions on factory policies and regulations; assisting the WWB collaborator team to design, implement and evaluate WWB activities with creative methods that engaged workeres and their family; and providing training and coaching to the WWB team to use effective visual methods (e.g. story telling, taking pictures, collecting workers’ quotes) to show-case excellent WWB champions and practices in order to recognize and promote WWB initiatives, which have proven to bring about great benefits to both NHNB workers and the factory middle level management team.
