How VisionSpring Fixes a Garment Worker ‘Problem Hiding in Plain Sight’
Across the globe, garment workers are some of the most poorly paid. And for those with as easily correctable of a condition as Presbyopia, the possibility of losing one’s job for not being able to thread a needle is a real concern. Many don’t have access to corrective eyewear, and even those who do may not want to be seen wearing them, fearful of management glimpsing any sign of weakness.
Add to that a workforce dominated two-to-one by women, who typically have even less access to basic necessities, and VisionSpring’s mission supplying 10 million pairs to manual laborers in the apparel, coffee and cocoa industries takes on new urgency.
More from Sourcing Journal
Boss Denies Factory 'Hired Goons' Who Beat Bangladeshi Union Leader to Death
Trimco and Raddis System to Increase Regenerative Farming in India
“It’s a new product introduction for a 700-year-old technology,” VisionSpring CEO Ella Gudwin told Sourcing Journal of the company whose backers include Levi’s and Supreme and Vans owner VF Corporation. “It’s simply an unknown issue and our job has been to begin to raise awareness about it. It’s super-exciting because it’s super-fixable. There are a lot of really expensive problems, and this is not one of them.”
Gudwin said 30 percent of the more than 400,000 garment industry workers VisionSpring has screened in Bangladesh, India and Vietnam have Presbyopia, meaning they have difficulty seeing clearly things within arm’s reach. It’s a normal part of aging caused by weakening lenses, and easily treated without a prescription.
“The distance vision glasses require a prescription, but the near vision correction is a simple magnifying glass,” Gudwin said. “They’re just ready-made reading glasses that you and I can get in any pharmacy, book shop or the train station, but in Bangladesh, they’re simply not available in a mass-market way.”
Gudwin said this “problem hiding in plain sight” tends to come as a surprise to factories and the major brands supporting them. Often, she said, the management in offices surrounding the factory floor will be filled with people wearing glasses, but not so the assembly-line workers. She recalls talking to a production planner of 15 years who said he was ashamed to realize the discrepancy had never occurred to him.
“Most of the brands have never thought about it,” Gudwin said. “What’s been so productive about the relationships with the brands is they basically gave us funding to be able to do demonstration sites.”
Since starting the push for brand sponsorship of screening in 2018, VisionSpring has visited 280 factories in four countries. A condition of these visits is that factories promise to ensure no punitive measures are taken against employees who wear glasses.
“Even if the company has zero intention of firing anybody, even if the company is genuinely like, ‘we’re here to help our workers,’ the workers can be afraid that if they wear glasses they’ll lose their jobs,” Gudwin said. “So having a safe environment for everybody in the factory to wear their glasses is really important.”
If workers are able to maximize their performance by being able to see clearly to thread needles, run a straight pin or make buttonholes, bottom-line profits can grow significantly, Gudwin said. A survey in 15 Bangladesh factories found that 97 percent of workers who received glasses reported an increase in confidence, 79 percent reported a decrease in frustration and 45 percent experienced a reduction in headaches.
“You can’t really ask people about depression and things like that, but asking about things like frustration is a precursor for overall wellness,” Gudwin said. “There is very strong evidence of the connection between vision correction, depression and mental health in studies done outside the garment sector.”
VisionSpring and its 330 employees rely on a funding formula composed mostly of philanthropic sources. It began as the passion project of New York optometrist Dr. Jordan Kassalow, who upon doing charitable screenings in developing countries realized that in many cases, people didn’t need full examinations as much as they needed reading glasses to correct Presbyopia.
“That’s like flying dentists halfway around the world to dispense a toothbrush,” Gudwin said.
Two decades since the founding of VisionSpring, Gudwin said the problem could be solved before it reached its third.
“If you about think it, there’s about 4 million garment workers in Bangladesh, 65 percent of them are women, responsible for 80 to 87 percent of [the country’s total exports] and a third of them can’t see clearly,” Gudwin said. “They’re geographically concentrated around factories where we can screen 40,000 people at a time. We could solve the problem in five years if everybody got on board.”
The preponderance of women in the workforce goes beyond the factory floor of today. Automation and mechanization requires the ability to read instructions, and already, Gudwin says, women are being left behind, in part because of the vision issue.
“With everything from laser cutting of jeans to no water wash cycles and things like that, when that mechanization is happening, the need for vision correction doesn’t go away,” she said. “There’s a trend toward men managing those machines rather than the women… but women can run those machines, too.”
