Workload and nutritional needs for works in textileand garment, leather and footwear sectors in Vietnam

Food at work is considered as an important issue which needs to be paid attention strictly in ILO’s Decent Work Agent. It is not only about the nutrition and food safety merely, it also impacts other conditions such as wage and income; working time and breaks (too short breaks for meals between shifts, shift work, etc.), infrastructure at workplace and worker’s health (may be affected by the quality of meals, chemicals at work place and other hazardous factors, etc.).

Worldwide, big businesses have continuously tried to get some progresses for low cost meals for example negotiating with food providers for safer and better foods or providing better dining room to make workers feel more comfortable. Meanwhile, small businesses may have many options with lower spending, depending on their own capacities and conditions. By any means, a meal with safe, clean and nourishing foods and at reasonable price is always in the first place. Beside the consideration of quality and portion, generally in some countries the suitable time for worker’s meals has been paid much attention.

In Vietnam, the nutrition and food safety assessment for shift meals is not a simple issue because of the diversity of shift meals, regional characteristics, supply capacity of business (depend on the financial ability). Besides, research activity requires multidisciplinary participation of medical, nutrition and toxic environment experts and managers, etc.

For the target of “protecting health and life of workers, protecting and developing human resources”, the Vietnam National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (VNNIOSH) has implemented a state level independent research project: “Assessing workload, nutritional needs, portion and establishing a set of criteria for nutrition and food safety of shift meals for workers in some sectors”. The project has been implemented in order to assess workload, nutritional needs and issues related to nutrition and to establish a set of criteria for nutrition for workers who are working at 48 textile and garment, leather and footwear companies.

Methods applied to assess workload and nutritional health include calculating working time and analyzing working characteristics; assessing lunch by qualitative methods (interview) and quantitative methods; checking health and performing some laboratory tests.

Research results of workload, health, nutritional needs and nutritional quality of meals in textile and garment, leather and footwear sectors show that:

– Working environment has many harmful factors such as heat, lighting, dust, noise, toxic gases (especially in textile and dyeing facilities). Besides, monotonous nature of work, repeated motions, restrictive postures (prolonged and frequent sitting or standing) that affect workers’ health and psychophysiology, then make them suffered from occupational and work-related diseases.

– The burden of physical strength in both sectors of textile and garment, leather and footwear are at levels of heavy and very heavy respectively. The burden of stress is at levels of high to very high. Heavy works consuming lots of calories and mainly from groups of cotton arrangement, yarn machine operation, joining yarn, cleaning pipe thread (at textile facilities); cutting, ironing, finishing, etc. (at garment facilities); cutting-chopping shoe models, soles cutting and pressing, sewing details, etc. (at leather and footwear facilities). Those are all heavy work