Relational contracting, health externalities, and labor supply in Bangladeshi apparel factories

Treatment (1) provides a message that the firm cares about their health, (2) provides treatment 1 + a message that respondents are entitled to sick leave and (3) provides treatment 2 + information about recourses if a request for sick leave is denied.

The specific text we use in the messages:

Control As a reminder, we are working with your employer, the [Anonymous Employer], to conduct this survey. Your responses to this survey will not be shared with [Anonymous Employer]. We will share the overall picture of worker’s health, based on many workers’ responses, with the [Anonymous Employer].

T1 As a reminder, we are working with your employer, the [Anonymous Employer], to conduct this survey. [Anonymous Employer] cares about the health of its employees and their families and has asked us to help by conducting this survey. Your responses to this survey will not be shared with [Anonymous Employer]. We will share the overall picture of worker’s health, based on many workers’ responses, with the [Anonymous Employer].

T2 As a reminder, we are working with your employer, the [Anonymous Employer], to conduct this survey. [Anonymous Employer] cares about the health of its employees and their families and has asked us to help by conducting this survey. Your responses to this survey will not be shared with [Anonymous Employer]. We will share the overall picture of worker’s health, based on many workers’ responses, with the [Anonymous Employer]. As an [Anonymous Employer] employee, you are entitled to paid sick leave, which [Anonymous Employer] encourages you to use if you are exposed to or have symptoms of COVID-19.

T3 As a reminder, we are working with your employer, the [Anonymous Employer], to conduct this survey. [Anonymous Employer] cares about the health of its employees and their families and has asked us to help by conducting this survey. Your responses to this survey will not be shared with [Anonymous Employer]. We will share the overall picture of worker’s health, based on many workers’ responses, with the [Anonymous Employer].

As an [Anonymous Employer] employee, you are entitled to paid sick leave, which [Anonymous Employer] encourages you to use if you are exposed to or have symptoms of COVID-19. You will not be punished for using your paid sick leave days. If your supervisor denies your request for paid sick leave or punishes you for using your paid sick leave days, please report this to the workers’ welfare officer (or HR department).

2021-11-19

2022-01-30

Job satisfaction, mental health

Job satisfaction: Construct an index following Anderson (2008) of the following variables:
• How satisfied are you with your job overall? (Select one: Very dissatisfied; Dissatisfied; Neutral; Satisfied; Very satisfied)
• For the following statements, please state whether you strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree.
a) For me this is the best of all possible organizations for which to work.
b) I find that my values and the organization’s values are very similar.
c) I feel very little loyalty to this organization
d) Often, I find it difficult to agree with this organization’s policies on important matters relating to its employees.
e) I am proud to tell others that I am part of this organization.

Mental health: Construct an index following Anderson (2008) of the following variables. In the past 7 days, how often have you… Select one: Not at all or less than 1 day; 1-2 days; 3-4 days; 5-7 days.
a. ...Have you felt nervous, anxious, or on edge?
b. ...Have you felt depressed?
c. ...Have you felt lonely?
d. ...Have you felt hopeful about the future?
e….. Being so restless that it is hard to sit still
f……. Becoming easily annoyed or irritable
g……. Feeling afraid, as if something awful might happen

absenteeism, physical health, direct reporting of covid symptoms

Absences: In the most recent full month, how many days of work did you miss? (dropping responses of “I don’t know’”)
Physical health: Construct an index following Anderson (2008) of the binary occurrence of the following symptoms in the past 12 weeks
a. Fever Select one: Yes; No.
b. An unusual dry cough: Yes; No.
c. Difficulty breathing/shortness of breath? Select one: Yes; No.
d. Loss of a sense of smell? Select one: Yes; No.
e. Headache? Select one: Yes; No.
f. Diarrhea? Select one: Yes; No.
g. Sore throat? Select one: Yes; No.
h. Unusual fatigue? Select one: Yes; No.
Direct reporting of Covid symptoms
To your knowledge, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, have you had any of these symptoms or tested positive for COVID-19?
To your knowledge, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, have any workers on your sewing line/in your section had symptoms of or tested positive for COVID-19? Select one. Yes; No.

We conduct a survey experiment with workers at two of the apparel manufacturer's factories, which together employ over 8,700 people. First, we conduct a stratified random selection of workers to participate in the survey experiment. Using the entire list of employees in the two factories, we sample workers from four types of production teams. Among these teams, we chose teams with a sufficient large number of workers to accommodate this survey and a separate survey that we are running for a different project (approximately above 15). We are left with 112 eligible teams and a total of 5,948 eligible workers, out of a workforce of 8,727 people, including 1,000 managers and administrative staff members.

We next stratify workers on eligible teams by their sex, which we identify based on name (male, female, uncertain). We are able to categorize names as male or female for 5,929 out of 5,948 eligible workers. In some cases, there are teams with very small numbers of one group; in this case, we aggregate these workers to the smallest level that yields a sufficiently large groups size (e.g., production section-floor).
We conduct this RCT in coordination with another survey experiment that we are running with the apparel manufacturer (RCT ID: AEARCTR-0007103). Consequently, we randomly sample workers from strata as follows:

1. For workers in the sewing section, for sewing line & female strata, randomly select 11 workers per stratum. For sewing line & male strata in the sewing section, which are smaller, randomly select men in proportion to the strata size. This produced an initial target sample of 574 workers.

2. The remaining 5,374 workers were eligible to be recruited for the other survey experiment, AEARCTR-0007103. For this survey experiment, within strata, the research team randomly selected workers as target participants. We randomly ordered the remaining workers in each stratum so that workers who declined to participate could be replaced. We conducted the second survey experiment, for which we recruited or attempted to recruit 3,638 workers. This left 1,736 eligible workers from the list of 5,374 workers who had not been recruited or attempted to be recruited for AEARCTR-0007103.

3. To arrive at the final target sample for this survey experiment, we appended the list of 574 workers and the list of 1,736 workers, for a maximum total sample size of 2,310. Given our successful recruitment rate of 62% in AEARCTR-0007103, we anticipate achieving a realized sample size of around 1,432.

We randomly assign workers to treatment arms in Stata. We randomly assign workers to each treatment arm with equal probability. To address misfits across strata, we use the randtreat package by Carril (2017). We conducted 10 randomizations and selected the one that performed best in terms of balance on two covariates available to the research team (tenure and skill group).

We randomly assign workers to treatment arms in Stata.

Individual

No

N/A

Maximum total sample size: 2,310. Expected response rate: 62%. Expected final sample size: 1,432.

Control: 578; Treatment arm 1: 569; Treatment arm 2: 582; Treatment arm 3: 581. Note that we expect the realized sample sizes to be approximately 62% of these sample sizes.

We used data from our pilot survey, which we conducted in the spring of 2021 with garment workers recruited through the community, to inform our power calculations. We construct the job satisfaction and mental health index variables as described above. We assume two primary outcomes and adjust for multiple hypothesis testing by applying the Bonferroni adjustment for two outcomes with alpha = 0.1. We set power = 0.8. As in our pilot, we only observe workers’ factory and gender, we residualize our outcome variables using factory x gender fixed effects. We assume 4 treatment arms. Under these assumptions, we can detect a 0.19 sd effect size for mental health with a sample size of 1364 workers, and the same magnitude effect size for job satisfaction with a sample size of 1424 workers. These MDEs and sample sizes are within our expected ranges.