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Workers’ Rights: advancing rights and opportunities where our clothes are made

Levi Strauss and Co. (LS&CO.) and the Levi Strauss Foundation (LSF) support the company’s commitment to responsible sourcing by providing grants to innovative local, national and global non-profit organizations that advance the human rights and well being of apparel workers in communities where our products are made. This program seeks to influence both business practice and the underlying social system in local communities. Through our grant making, which pays special attention to the needs of women in apparel factory settings, we aim to build the capacity of local organizations and governments to improve living and working conditions.

When we began our workers’ rights grant making program in 1999, we quickly learned that in order to have the greatest impact, our focus needed to be geographically tailored, taking into consideration the particular needs of communities, socio-political frameworks that keep people in poverty, shifting trade-preference programs and opportunities to buy-in to innovative anti-poverty strategies. In Latin America, for example, we not only fund labor rights education but also invest in asset building and financial literacy programs to address the impact of the expiration of the Multi Fiber Arrangement (MFA) on that region. In Haiti, HIV/AIDS prevention is a critical component of our workers’ rights grant making, which also includes microfinance and financial literacy programs. In China, a country with a large female migrant labor force and generally weak enforcement of the labor laws to protect it, we fund legal aid programs that are taking on a range of issues pertinent to the needs of this population.

Workers’ rights grant programs currently reach approximately 300,000 apparel and textile workers annually in 15 countries where our products are made.

Through our grant making, we seek to improve the lives of apparel and textile workers by:

• Educating workers and factory management on labor rights and responsibilities;
• Enhancing worker-management communication and factory-level dispute resolution mechanisms;
• Improving the health of workers;
• Providing asset building opportunities for workers; and
• Supporting legal aid and arbitration channels to build local capacity to enforce labor laws.