LSF Grantee Helps Improve the Lives of China’s Migrant Women Workers
According to China’s 2000 national population census, there are well over 60 million migrant women workers in the country’s highly industrialized Guangdong province. Because China’s social services and other benefits are tied to the person’s original place of residence, migrant women workers find themselves without access to public benefits, social services or social networks where they can obtain basic information on critical issues such as health care, their rights as women and as workers, education and financial literacy.
While China is not a top sourcing country for LS&CO., we do produce there. Many of our licensees manufacture in Chinese factories as well. Our experience with our Terms of Engagement over the years has taught us that when workers are healthy and informed about their rights and the systems in place to ensure that those rights are respected, our Terms of Engagement can be more effective and living standards for all workers in the region can improve. To address the need to educate and empower migrant women workers, the Levi Strauss Foundation embarked on a unique philanthropic endeavor that would ultimately provide hundreds of thousands of migrant women workers with life-skills education and training, health services and counseling, and legal aid.
Administered by the Asia Foundation, the LSF-funded program works at the grassroots level through local women’s organizations and trade unions to deliver services directly to workers. These groups assist migrant women through education, training and counseling to build confidence, knowledge and access to services in such areas as labor rights awareness and self-protection; women’s health and hygiene (including HIV/AIDS prevention and occupational safety and health); psychological health and social integration; communication skills (including conflict resolution); legal rights and legal aid; and asset building.
Most of the migrant women in Guangdong are between 18 and 25 years-old, unmarried, have little education and come from poorer provinces situated within the Yangtze River region. For most, their travels to places like Guangdong represent the first time they have ever left their homes. They come to Guangdong to earn more than they would in their home provinces and will typically work in foreign-invested companies and other enterprises that produce consumer goods such as toys, clothing, footwear or electronics to send money back to their families. The Asia Foundation program provides services to migrant women working in any sector, not just women working in plants producing for LS&CO.
To date, more than 250,000 migrant women workers have participated in LSF-funded programs in more than 200 factories and in 22 cities in the Pearl River Delta. In the past five years, the LSF/Asia Foundation program has:
- Established 21 worker education and counseling centers throughout the Pearl River Delta that conduct regular lectures, training workshops, roundtables and seminars on women workers’ issues.
- Increased effectiveness and access to legal services and grievance counseling through a wide legal aid network and strategic partnerships.
- Launched the first legal aid program focused solely on workers’ issues.
- Developed occupational health and safety training projects.
- Extended workplace peer education on HIV/AIDS prevention to all program training and counseling centers in the Pearl River Delta.
The LSF/Asia Foundation program was the first effort of its kind in China. After six years of mounting success, several other global companies doing business in China’s industrial regions have sought to replicate the program. “This grant was foundational in terms of setting up basic capacity to improve the lives of migrant workers– not only in terms of their rights, but for their overall well-being,” said Daniel Lee, LSF program manager. “Other brands coming in and doing similar work is an enormous help in achieving our capacity-building goals, but it also means that they recognize the importance of a healthy and educated migrant labor force.”
Ask anyone at LSF and they will tell you the Asia Foundation program is one of LSF’s great workers' rights success stories. “It was a huge undertaking when the foundation made the first grant back in 1999,” Daniel said, “but Chinese migrant workers’ living and working conditions are changing for the better, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that we have been part of that change.”
For more information on the Asia Foundation project, go to http://www.asiafoundation.org/pdf/china.improve.women.pdf