In 2011, we launched a social dialogue
project in Bangladesh. The aim is to
help supplier factories in establishing
democratically elected workplace
committees and to improve the
dialogue between management and
factory employees. Since then, we
collaborated with external experts
to train the management and workers
which finally led to the free
election of workplace committees
that are in an active dialogue with
the management. Our goal for 2014
was to expand this project and cover
15% of our Bangladeshi supplier
factories. We exceeded this goal and
reached over 20%. As a result of the
project, 30 factories now have workplace
committees in place with over
70,000 workers represented by them.
Another 30 factories are currently
in the process of setting up committees.
With this progress, our target
is now to reach 100% of the Bangladeshi
factories in the project by 2018
at the latest. This project marks the
starting point for our goal to ensure
democratically elected workplace
representation at all strategic suppliers
globally (s. 2.21) and we will use
these experiences when rolling out
similar projects in other markets.