Background

Better Work – a collaboration between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group – is a comprehensive programme bringing together all levels of the garment industry to improve working conditions and respect of labour rights for workers and boost the competitiveness of apparel businesses. Currently, the programme is active in about 2,000 factories employing more than 3 million workers in 13 countries.

As well as advising factories, Better Work collaborates with government agencies to improve labour laws and with multinational buyers to ensure their collaboration and support toward sustainable compliance. It also advises unions and employers’ representatives on how to give workers a more significant say in their lives and works with donors to help achieve their broader development goals. Better Work’s vision is a global garment industry that lifts millions of people out of poverty by providing decent work, empowering women, driving business competitiveness, and promoting inclusive economic growth.

A core goal of Better Work’s global strategy is to promote sustainable mechanisms for compliance that go far beyond Better Work’s scope and role.  Sound industrial relations at enterprise, sectoral and national levels and throughout global supply chains are central to meeting this objective. Better Work will contribute to the broader ILO’s aim to advance social justice through the realization of freedom of association and effective recognition of collective bargaining as enabling rights and the promotion of inclusive and effective social dialogue for human-centred development. Better Work envisions global supply chains where workers’ fundamental rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining are respected and where social dialogue takes place at factory, sectoral, national and global levels supported by mature industrial relations, enabling the promotion of decent work.

Key to Better Work’s approach is engaging with factories, specifically management and workers’ representatives, to ensure compliance with international labour standards and national laws, and make improvements to the systems for ensuring decent work and competitive business. Strengthening industrial relations at the workplace is essential in order to achieve this. Better Work’s current factory engagement model promotes a system of assessment (identifying areas for improvement), advisory services (coaching to factory management and workers’ representatives) and training (capacity building to ensure increased ownership and skills). This model has seen successful outcomes, however requires a BW Programme in country in order to be delivered. Better Work is looking to explore models which allow for the delivery of key components of BW’s approach without necessarily having a full-scale programme in country. This project aims to develop an intervention focused specifically on improving industrial relations which can be delivered to factories in both BW and non-BW countries, using a tailored approach. It could be delivered by BW staff or others that could be trained on the methodology. As such, the final products of this assignment are meant to be provided in a format that allows to train others on them.

Objective

Better Work seeks to contract a consultant to develop a thematic factory level intervention on industrial relations with potential linkages to more sectoral intervention opportunities. Better Work proposes a holistic intervention aimed at progressively improving the industrial relations (relations between workers and employer) in factories through a combination of guided diagnosis (identifying areas for improvement), support to improve management systems and training. Better Work’s IR Improvement Programme should build on Better Work’s experiences across thirteen country programmes and the research which shows the importance of workplace cooperation to increased compliance and business outcomes. The programme is aimed to be delivered in factories that are either not currently enrolled in the BW programme or are wanting a more of a specific intervention on industrial relations. As such this intervention provides a thematic version of delivery, based on BW’s full methodology and tools of factory engagement services. At the same time, the consultant is tasked to suggest ideas for how the intervention could be used more broadly beyond the factory floor. This could mean training national tripartite constituents on the methodology, for example representatives of employer or worker organisations, or thinking about other linkages to sectoral needs using the final products beyond single factory interventions.

An initial outline of the programme has been drafted, as well as the framework for the guided diagnosis. The consultant will be responsible for expanding the existing work to develop a full-fledged programme and tools which can be piloted by Better Work in 2025.

Scope of work

The consultant is expected to:

1. Update and finalize the programme framework and outline
2. Develop introductory and orientation materials on the programme to be shared with factories.
3. Finalize the guided diagnostic tool, including questions and guidance, based on BW’s existing assessment tool
4. Develop a guideline for BW staff outlining recommendations for response packages based on the outcomes of the guided diagnosis. Recommendations should include what the follow up trainings, coaching (advisory services) and self-work for factory should be. Identify gaps in BW’s current training and advisory materials which may need to be developed to support the outcomes of the diagnosis.
5. Develop a workshop framework for sharing back findings with factories and developing an action plan.
6. Develop an action planning template for the factory based on recommendations
7. Make suggestions on how these tools could be used beyond single enterprises, e.g. by sharing them strategically with other industry actors which could be national constituents but also other third parties.

It is envisioned that the consultant will:

• Use the existing framework and drafted materials as a starting point, building off of BW’s existing factory engagement model and tools
• Engage closely with the BW team and the Technical Officer, Social Dialogue throughout the process
• Deliver finalized materials which can be piloted by the BW team

Tasks and deliverables

The expected timeline of the work is from February 2025 to May 2025.

The following set of deliverables (with corresponding tentative timeline) are expected to guide the work of the contracted researcher(s):

Payment schedule

The contracted researcher(s) will be paid upon satisfactory completion of deliverables to be determined and upon receipt of signed invoices. A tentative payment schedule is provided below:

Qualifications

• Over 5 years of previous experience working at the enterprise level to develop interventions to strengthen systems, improve decent work and promote compliance, ideally in garment supply chains
• Over 5 years experience working on strengthening industrial relations, social dialogue, grievance handling and addressing violatiosn of freedom of association, ideally in garment supply chains
• Excellent writing and presentation skills, with the ability to produce clear, concise, and insightful documents.
• Strong understanding and knowledge of ILO Standards, particularly related to freedom of association, collective bargaining, grievance and dispute resolution and workplace cooperation and communication.
• Fluency in English, both verbal and written. Fluency in Spanish is an asset.
• Experience working in diverse cultural settings, showing sensitivity and adaptability to local contexts.
• Familiarity or previous work experience in Central America is an asset.

Submission

All applicants must send their technical and financial proposals to betterwork@ilo.org. The deadline to submit your application is 25 January 2025 at midnight (CET). Only selected applicants will be contacted for an interview.