In each country, Better Work has provided accessible data through its transparency and data sharing portals, robust analysis and experience from factory engagement to illustrate how national policies affect factory-level practices, and how policy experiments at the enterprise level can be scaled at the industry and national levels. In Viet Nam, for example, the programme has influenced national policy and regulations, including through its inputs to the national labour law revision. This has been possible thanks to the availability and trust in enterprise-level data collected. Transparently reporting on non-compliance issues at the factory level has been identified as a key driver for improvements in working conditions.
During its last phase, 2017-2022, Better Work’s data and evidence informed:
The Better Work Transparency Portal, where we disclose the names of the factories registered with several of our programmes and their compliance with key national and international labour standards, has the potential to be an essential tool for policymakers, regulators, businesses and employer and worker organisations, who strive to promote decent work across an ever-changing industry.
By 2027, Better Work will have continued to collect, analyze and share robust data and evidence on labour conditions and compliance as well as all strategy priority themes. The Programme will engage with national constituents to improve their access to and capacity to use Better Work’s own and other sources of reliable data to inform evidence-based policy making to protect workers’ rights in the garment industry and support enterprises to be resilient and to adapt to future industry transformations, including through predictive technologies.
Better Work’s Data and Evidence Action Plan is responsive and designed to evolve over the lifetime of our strategy, Sustaining Impact, 2022/27. In consultation with global and national partners, we will continue to refine our action plans to ensure they support long-term, progressive change.
By taking advantage of the rapid shift towards digitalization, Better Work will collect and analyze more granular data to inform all strategic priority themes. Better Work will also strengthen its role as a steward of data quality and integrity and its potential to act as an authority in the interpretation of labour data from the garment industry, as generated by the programme’s own operations, by the ILO’s access to micro-level datasets at the national level, by national constituents and by other industry actors.
At the global level, in collaboration with an extensive academic network, Better Work analyzes and aggregates data and evidence from across countries to draw cross-cutting policy lessons that inform the international community on issues related to labour regulation, gender equality, social dialogue and different aspects of working conditions and labour rights. Our data and evidence have also been essential for internal quality assurance, monitoring and evaluation and operational learning. This knowledge evidence brokering function relies on robust data sharing and effective exchanges of data and evidence between Better Work, ILO, IFC (as part of World Bank Group), national constituents, and industry partners.
Better Work is set to further engage with national constituents to determine what data and evidence they need, and how to best utilize what is already available. The programme will improve constituents’ access to and capacity to use Better Work’s own and other sources of reliable data on our strategy’s thematic priorities. For example, we will continue to support the capacity development of labour inspectors, including by facilitating their access to compliance data and by strengthening their analytical skills to manipulate it, and we will work with worker organizations at the global and national levels, in order to facilitate their access to data to support evidence-based social dialogue and bargaining.
We will support data collection on the thematic areas of our strategy across all our country programmes.
Better Work five-year strategy (2022-27) embraces innovation around a set of strategic priorities to adapt to the needs of the garment and footwear industry around the world.