Workspace Issues

Last week the women of Kodaghalli demonstrated their screen-printing process using tote bags. While I marveled at their cooperation and the efficiency with which they operated, I worried about their attention to the quality of the product (or lack thereof). The bags that they cranked out so quickly often had flaws—ink smears, crooked prints, smudged letters or a combination of the three. What especially worried me was that they did not react to these problems until we had pointed them out. And here the interns also ran into a problem, as we were not sure how to stress the importance of quality control without harming the confidence of the women. In print, this does not seem like a challenge. After all, we just had to point out the different problems with the bags so the women could keep an eye out for them. Unfortunately, in reality, it was hard to critique the bags without the women feeling like we were blaming them as well.

In order to avoid this problem, we tried a different approach. The four of us (interns) spread out around the workspace to where different stations of women were working and tried to work together with the women to find flaws in the bags and figure out ways to fix them. This way, each step of the screen-printing had someone checking for quality; in addition, we—the very foreign, very young interns— were able to avoid alienating the women by working with (rather than talking at) them. The next time the women started screen-printing, they started pointing out small smudges that even we had missed. While this certainly seems like a success, another source of worry for us was whether the women would continue to implement this new quality-checking process without the interns. And here we run into the problem that I’ve mentioned in my previous posts (though in different contexts): establishing new norms. Quality control is not yet a standard in these workspaces and is something we need establish, especially as we connect these women to global markets where such norms are already in place.