Coherent system for monitoring and remediation

At Sunknit, our Indian supplier which makes 3.5% of our cotton volume, a FWF audit took place in November 2020. The audit took place under Covid-19 measures and despite this the report looked very positive. It was clearly written that salaries were covered during the lockdown periods. As we are 2 FWF-members producing at Sunknit, our collegues of a Germany based FWF member is taking the lead for following the CAP’s. We exchanges experiences and findings among FWF members, but we maintained also direct conversations with Sunknit on social topics, especially on living wages. Sunknit also obtained the GOTS-certification, which is reinforcing their ethical standards and provide us with organic cotton items. We will organize a new updated audit probably in 2023 or 2024.

Furthermore, from our Chinese factories making 11% of our garment production, we received updated BSCI and/or SEDEX audit reports. In particular for our toy supplier, we had a constructive dialogue with the supplier on CAP follow up. F.e. to avoid overtime, they recruited extra staff.

2.3 An employee survey @ Tekumut

In 2021, The Woody Group took the initiative for a worker satisfaction survey is its main production location, Bella Tekstil – Tekumut in Turkey, Duzce. The Worker Education Programme on Social Dialogue, organized in March 2022, gave rise to some complaints via the FWF helpline. As a follow up to these complaints, the management of Tekumut decided to repeat the worker satisfaction survey, to have a good estimate of the complaints and to show the workers that their opion matters. 194 workers (ca 90% of the employees) responded to the survey, which contained 27 questions related to general satisfaction, safety & working conditions, their function, their wellbeing & worker participation and social dialogue. The paper questionnaires were sent to Studio D, and independent sustainability agency that analyzed the results.

The responses on the 27 questions you can find on the next page. It is visible that there is a value of repeating surveys so you can see if some parameters are changing and really go to rootcause analysis.

The overal feeling is that the very good feedback of the last year survey has dropped with 10% in general. The survey was introduced to the workers in September 2022, in the end of the peak season, just before holidays, and at a moment that extreme inflation played as a high stress factor. It was the wish of the management to have this survey in this moment to understand even better emotions of the workers at Tekumut.