Abstract
Addressing labor issues in the apparel industry is significantly important due to customers’ increasing awareness of poor working conditions and growing labor crises in apparel production locations worldwide. Decent work is a key element to achieving fair and harmonious employment, but is not always evident in global apparel production networks. This study examines the working conditions in China’s garment manufacturing industry, which employs more than 10 million workers. A survey was administered to 313 blue-collar workers and 228 white-collar workers on issues related to decent work, including workers’ concerns, satisfaction levels and attitudes towards decent work. Regression analysis showed that workers’ attitudes are significantly related to age, education level, service length and monthly wage. Gap analysis revealed poor understanding of decent work and low satisfaction with primary indicators of decent work. However, results suggest that workers increasingly value soft factors and the overall work experience, not only financial benefits. Cluster analysis identified four clusters of workers. This study contributes to understanding garment worker perceptions of decent work and provides implications for the operationalization of decent work in China’s garment manufacturing industry.
Highlights
Social aspects of sustainability, including working conditions and labor rights, are of increasing interest in academic research on global production networks, global value chains and supply chain management in the apparel industry [1,2,3,4]
To reduce its negative social impact in terms of worker exploitation, the apparel industry is increasingly engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives on a global scale, some of which are related to decent work [2,11,12,13]
There is little evidence documenting working conditions of garment workers and little research has been done on decent work from the perspective of garment workers, even though references to and case studies of countries are common in recent literature [16,17,18,19,20]
Summary
Social aspects of sustainability, including working conditions and labor rights, are of increasing interest in academic research on global production networks, global value chains and supply chain management in the apparel industry [1,2,3,4]. Existence of CSR standards does not necessarily mean that companies rigidly follow them [21] but previous research has fallen short of providing figures on the satisfaction and concerns for decent work from the perspective of workers [16,17,22]. An examination of decent work from the perspective of production line and office workers in garment manufacturing businesses could provide a more accurate reflection of working conditions in China. This study aims to provide a more detailed insight into perceptions and attitudes of today’s garment workers in China, which could assist HR managers to identify what workers care about and provide insight on how to improve job satisfaction in order to better recruit and retain employees, improving enterprises’ social and economic performance
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