Case Studies | Levi Strauss & Company: Improving Worker Well-Being in the Workplace and Community

The Challenge

Too often, supply chain compliance programs fall short of ensuring that worksite-based improvements meaningfully improve workers’ lives. Top-down requirements to raise wages, reduce overtime, or reduce chemical exposure, for example, cannot sufficiently address the myriad challenges workers face to raise their standard of living, improve their health, or enhance their access to professional-development opportunities.

As a leader in supply chain innovation that is committed to improving workers’ well-being, Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&CO) saw an opportunity to address this challenge. In early 2011, the company committed to creating a new strategy for its existing supply chain labor program, and enlisted BSR to help determine how the company could improve workers’ lives beyond the factory walls.

Our Strategy

To help LS&CO create a strategy with clear priorities, objectives, and metrics, BSR helped the company draft a vision—inspired by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—framed around five pillars: economic empowerment, good health and family well-being, equality and acceptance, education and professional development, and access to a safe and healthy environment. The company will use those pillars to guide investments to meet workers’ basic needs, extend benefits to their families, and invest in strategic community projects.

We also helped design a continuum for investment that reflects workers’ evolving needs, as well as the diversity of needs across the company’s procurement locations. We created targets and measurements to assess the performance of investments in meeting needs along the continuum.

Lastly, we helped the company take its first step toward implementation by working with civil society and academic stakeholders—including Better Work, Verité, CARE, BSR’s China Training Institute, and HERproject—to design a unique worker-needs assessment survey. The survey findings will ensure that the company’s investments are based on actual workers’ needs.

Our Impact

LS&CO has implemented the needs assessment survey at key supplier sites in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, Haiti, and Pakistan. The company will publicly share these findings—and the survey itself—to provide insight on what workers in the supply chain say they really need, such as health, sanitation, emergency preparedness, access to banking, professional skills development, or freedom from discrimination.

Overall, this collaboration represented a foundation for LS&CO and BSR’s shared commitment to push the field of sustainability, in this case, fast-forwarding from basic compliance to ensuring supply chain jobs improve individual and community well-being.

Lessons Learned

Lessons learned from this process include:

• While compliance is important, it has limitations. Companies should continue to strengthen monitoring and supplier performance against standards when seeking innovative approaches.
• Engagement across different departments within a company is critical to the success of any major strategy reconfiguration, particularly one that involves the core business and the company’s philanthropic arm. It was important to incorporate a variety of perspectives and to promote collaborative implementation throughout the process.
• KStrategies that work globally must be flexible to ensure relevance for different countries. This is especially true around scope, specific investment type and area, cost, and type of partners.
• When developing programs to support workers’ well-being, it is vital to focus on workers and engage them directly to identify these needs. It is also critical to engage vendor management to ensure support and understanding of the potential benefits of such programs.
• To achieve industry scale, it is important to engage other brands and retailers, in a collaborative approach, pooling knowledge and engagement with shared vendors.