New Partnership with USA PopSockets

PSYDEH is thrilled to partner with PopSockets on a new educational initiative in 2020-2021.

PopSockets, a USA company with a global reach, works with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to engage with civil society in a variety of areas. Civil society organizations programming helps to improve working conditions in partner factories, one of which is in Tijuana, Mexico (known as XB). PopSockets has partnered previously with nonprofits to provide educational programs for their production facilities (primarily in China). With PSYDEH’s innovative, three-phased project, PopSockets is exploring a new strategy that meets FLA standards.

The project invites workers and their employers to take greater responsibility for safe working conditions. It invites workers to think creatively about improving working conditions in a human-led, sustainable way. For example, workers are taught effective skills to improve worker-management communication channels..

For PSYDEH, this project described also in this case study demonstrates our ability to diversify. It expands our reach across the Republic and integrates learnings from the British Council’s Active Citizens training. It also shows how our unique values-based, adult leader empowerment methods are useful for workers and employers, as well as rural citizens.

As PSYDEH Senior Damon Taylor says,

“PSYDEH believes that we solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using our ears and eyes and the best tools we can find. Indeed, just as a plastic injection machine used to make phone cases needs constant care, so does the line manager helping her female worker to operate the machine. And this “care” should include training that reflects the workers’ needs, ideally around soft skills and discipline practices to improve leader potential, as well as relate to others. We feel fortunate to have found a partner in PopSockets and XB — they understand this need for soft-skill building as key for problem-solving and benefiting XB’s 700 factory workers, more than 50% of whom are women.”

The project’s three elements include:

(1) Conduct appreciative inquiry with PopSockets and XB to understand worker-student demographics and demand for 1-2 training topics from this list: autonomy, storytelling as a feedback tool, civic leader values (and their disciplines), conflict resolution, and teamwork skills.

(2) Co-create a curriculum and materials for training up to 50-line managers on skills needed to own their working conditions-related rights and responsibilities, including how to train workers who are unable to attend the training.

(3) Facilitate follow-up with participants to sustain impact and evaluate training effectiveness to inform anticipated future actions.

PopSockets, XB, and PSYDEH anticipate that this initial project is the beginning of a multi-year, win-win-win partnership.