Systemic Silence: Worker Voice in Viet Nam's Lower Tiers Remains a Work in Progress

The garment and footwear sector has spent the better part of two decades building audit infrastructure around Tier 1 suppliers. Social compliance programmes, third-party inspections, corrective action frameworks—the machinery of brand accountability has been refined, contested, and refined again. What it has not done, with any consistency, is travel further down the chain.

The reasons for this are not difficult to identify. Tier 2 factories—those supplying fabric, yarn, and raw materials to the Tier 1 producers that brands contract with directly—tend to operate with significantly fewer resources. According to Quan Trang of the Centre for Development and Integration (CDI Viet Nam), who presented at the February session, lower-tier factories face limited infrastructure, weaker compliance systems, and lower awareness of both national labour law and international labour standards. Management capacity is thinner. Health and safety conditions are more basic. And crucially, many of these factories have had little or no direct contact with the brands whose products their materials ultimately feed into.

That invisibility has consequences. Capacity gaps at lower tiers, Trang noted, directly affect overall supply chain performance and compliance—yet these suppliers receive the least support. The result is self-reinforcing: the further from Tier 1, the greater the risk exposure, and the less equipped the factory to do anything about it.

For brands, the calculus has historically been straightforward, if not particularly defensible. Direct suppliers are easier to reach, easier to audit, and easier to hold accountable through commercial leverage. Tier 2 relationships are often mediated—brands may not even know which fabric mills supply their Tier 1 contractors, let alone have the means to engage them directly. Whether that reluctance reflects operational complexity or a deliberate strategic distance from lower-tier risk is a question brands have yet to answer publicly—and one the industry has largely avoided asking.

What made the Viet Nam pilot notable was its funding model. The project was selected through the ideas competition of the Partnership for Sustainable Textiles, a public-private initiative, which covered the cost of the comprehensive training programme. The Atlat GmbH grievance tool was funded separately by the brands themselves. That division of cost—public money for capacity building, private money for the technology—enabled an intervention that neither party could easily have financed alone.

The multi-stakeholder architecture mattered too. Deuter Sport GmbH's Natalie Birke was direct on this point at the session: partnering with Ortovox  Sportartikel GmbH allowed the project to build on overlapping supply chains, increasing leverage and enabling stronger collaboration across factories that might otherwise have been approached piecemeal. CARE Deutschland e.V. contributed expertise in labour rights across South-East Asia, as well as project management support throughout the initiative. CDI brought local knowledge and the credibility that comes with it.

The project was not just about installing a digital tool—it required rebuilding internal systems first.

The decision to sequence the intervention—internal mechanisms first, external digital tool second—was not incidental. It reflected a clear-eyed assessment of what tends to go wrong when grievance technology is introduced into environments that are not yet ready for it. A tool that workers do not trust or feel safe using is not a grievance mechanism. It is a piece of software.

CDI structured the intervention across six training modules, beginning with a baseline assessment survey to establish the specific conditions in each factory before any training was delivered. The approach was deliberate—and the reach was notable: the baseline survey reached approximately 45% of workers and 84% of managers across participating factories, administered via the Atlat digital survey tool on smartphone. Rather than applying a standardised programme uniformly across all nine, the data allowed CDI to tailor content to what was actually happening on the ground. The endline assessment, conducted after the full training cycle, provided comparable data against which to measure change.

The first two modules focused on internal systems—assessing existing grievance channels, identifying their weaknesses, and equipping both managers and workers with the communication skills needed for constructive dialogue. Critically, workers and managers were trained separately before being brought together. The joint dialogue sessions that followed—eighteen in total across the project—provided what Trang described as a structured, safe space for workers to raise concerns and for management to respond, in some cases offering immediate resolutions.

The numbers that emerged from the programme were, on their face, encouraging. Fifty-five trainings were conducted across the nine factories. By the project's close, 90% of survey respondents confirmed they knew how to use the Atlat backup mechanism if they had a complaint they did not wish to raise internally. Two factories formally integrated grievance procedures into their internal labour policies—a tangible shift that goes beyond awareness.

The programme also addressed gender equity and the prevention of sexual harassment, aligning eight international labour standards with Viet Namese labour law. CARE Viet Nam contributed a focus on more vulnerable workers and do-no-harm considerations—an acknowledgement that grievance mechanisms, if poorly designed, can expose the very people they are meant to protect.

What the training appeared to shift, beyond procedural knowledge, was something harder to quantify. Workers became noticeably less anxious, project leaders reported, and more willing to raise concerns directly with managers. One factory manager described the change in terms that went beyond the mechanical: "What used to be one-sided, top-down communication has become something where people on the floor also make suggestions and improvements." That internal grievance numbers rose significantly after the trainings is telling—though whether it reflects genuine improvement or simply the surfacing of problems that had nowhere to go before is a question that deserves to stay open.

Workers became "noticeably less anxious," according to project leaders—but institutional culture does not shift in a year.

The most arresting figure to emerge from the Viet Nam pilot is also the most difficult to interpret. Across nine factories, over fifteen months, and following an extensive training programme delivered across 55 training sessions, four grievances were submitted through the Atlat external grievance system. Three further complaints were abandoned mid-submission, outside of training days. The categories—payment terms, working hours, potential labour law violations—were serious. The volume was not.

In compliance terms, four complaints across nine factories over fifteen months can be read as stability. In accountability terms, they can read as silence.

The question that number raises is precisely the one the project's presenters did not avoid at the February session. Is a low complaint figure a sign of success, or of silence? The honest answer, as Josua Andreas Ovari of Atlat GmbH acknowledged, is that it is genuinely difficult to say. Several explanations are plausible—and more than one may be true simultaneously.

The first is the most optimistic: that improved internal systems reduced the need for external escalation. If workers felt confident raising concerns directly with management—as the training was explicitly designed to enable—fewer issues would need to travel outside the factory. The rapid response of brands upon receiving push notifications from the Atlat system lends some weight to this reading, with factories contacted promptly and issues potentially resolved before requiring further escalation.

The second explanation is more uncomfortable. Cultural reluctance to use formal complaint mechanisms—particularly external ones—runs deep in many manufacturing contexts, and Viet Nam is not an exception. The hesitation to speak up, Trang noted at the session, is not only a function of absent channels. It is also psychological. Workers may understand that a mechanism exists and still not use it, for reasons that training alone cannot fully dislodge. The three complaints abandoned mid-submission gesture at something in that space—a moment of intent that did not become action.

The third explanation is technical. The Atlat system underwent iterative improvement across the project, with a later training module introducing an updated version of the tool with fewer errors. A Zalo channel was added—significant in the Viet Namese context, where the messaging platform is widely used. A feature showing when a complainant has opened a complaint was also introduced. Accessibility, the adjustments suggested, is not only about awareness—it is about friction, familiarity, and the digital habits of the people the tool is meant to serve.

Low grievance uptake is not unique to this project. Across the broader literature on worker voice mechanisms, digital and otherwise, low initial complaint volumes are common. Digital tools, however well designed, cannot substitute for the conditions that make speaking up feel genuinely safe—and those conditions are not built in a single project cycle.

The project highlights both the promise and the limits of digital grievance systems in complex production environments.

A Pilot Ends, Questions Remain

Deuter and Ortovox have committed to continuing their collaboration with Atlat for another twelve months, keeping the external grievance channel active across the participating factories. A follow-up survey is planned within that period to measure the lasting impact of the training programme. Both brands have confirmed their ongoing commitment to CDI as a local delivery partner—a recognition that local expertise and cultural fluency are not easily replaced.

Whether the model scales is a separate question. Atlat operates across multiple tiers and countries, and the project's architecture—public funding for training, private funding for technology, NGO delivery on the ground—is replicable in principle. In practice, the harder question is whether brands sustain that commitment beyond pilot funding cycles. As one factory manager put it: "If communication is always one-sided, sustainability never works."

The Viet Nam pilot suggests that building meaningful grievance infrastructure below Tier 1 is achievable. Whether it becomes standard practice—rather than a funded exception—is the question the industry has not yet seriously confronted.