This workshop uses six scenarios based on real problems that workers and the organizations defending their rights face in factories. The goal is to develop participants’ capacity to decide when and how to engage with clothing brands. To read the scenarios presented to participants, click here:
Exercise One
The six scenarios are first read and reviewed by all the participants. They are then asked to work together to develop a series of questions that would help them to strategize and decide whether or not to engage with the brand in each scenario. Some of those questions are documented here:
The objective of this first exercise is to have participants analyze each scenario based on the considerations that they developed in order to determine which of the six scenarios represent opportunities to engage with a brand. In this exercise, the participants should recognize that two of the scenarios should be eliminated: scenario 5 "Factory Closure" and scenario 6 "Freedom of Association."
Exercise Two
The remaining four scenarios are used again in Exercise Two where participants are asked to role play a meeting with representatives of each of the brands identified in the scenarios.
Before beginning this exercise, participants learn how to document their case and to write a letter to a brand:
For each of the four scenarios, a participant plays the role of the brand representative mentioned in their scenario. The rest of the participants divide into four small groups and prepare a strategy for the meeting. They then appoint one person from the group to play the role of the group’s representative in the meeting with the brand and to discuss the case described in the scenario.
Each meeting with a brand representative is played out for ten minutes after which the facilitators and the participants evaluate and comment on the interaction and make suggestions for how to improve the discussion. See the document How and why is this information about brands useful?
Instructions for the role plays for each group and for the brand representatives in each scenario can be found here.
[Do not share the instructions for the brand representatives with the other participants, and do not share the reply letters from the brands with any of the participants until they are in small groups for the third exercise.]
Exercise Three
The scenarios are used one last time during the third exercise. Participants received fictitious letters from the brands that were said to have been written in response to the role play meeting.
Participants are asked to consider the following questions:
Should you continue engaging with this brand?
Have your demands changed based on the brand’s response?
Do you need more information in order to back up your demands?
Do you need to be in touch with allied organizations? If so, who would you contact?
In the large group, participants report on their group’s decision and discuss and evaluate next steps.