The impact of information and role models on garment workers in Vietnam : evidence from a field experiment

Abstract

Workplace related skills have long been recognized as an important source of productivity growth. Existing work has either evaluated skill training programs or illustrated the learning-by-doing effect, abstracting from workers’ choices to acquire skills. In this paper, we focus on a crucial intermediary step by studying workers’ choice in which skills to acquire. We conducted a field experiment in two garment factories belonging to the same corporation in Northern Vietnam. We focus on the workers in six sewing workshops. We test two interventions aimed at increasing workers’ skill acquisition, increasing their effort, and, ultimately, their productivity. The intervention is designed to mimic the typical social media content that workers consume in their spare time. Each intervention consists of eight short videos that were delivered electronically in the Facebook groups set up at the beginning of the study. Workers were randomly allocated to one of four groups: information intervention, role model intervention, combined intervention and placebo groups. Our interventions do change workers’ behavior. First, information provision increased workers’ effort and decreased their usage of advanced skills during production. Tasks with higher skill requirements have higher piece rates, and productivity is measured by daily piece wage. As a result, daily productivity decreased. Second, sole role model has no significant impact on either workers’ effort or workers’ skill usage as measured by an advanced-skill index. However, role model does increase workers’ usage of B-level skills in production and output on B-level tasks, which are the second most difficult tasks that are the stepping stones to the most difficult tasks. We also find heterogeneous treatment effects on workers in the dimensions of gender, baseline skill level and baseline effort level. We have several main takeaways from the results. First, among the two ways to increase productivity–increase effort and investing in advanced skills–workers tend to progress on one dimension and regress on the other. Since workers have time and effort constraint, it’s difficult for them to improve both dimensions. Second, workers seek to improve on the dimension that has a lower threshold (less costly). Exerting effort is easier than acquiring new skills. Likewise, acquiring the second most difficult skills is easier than acquiring the most difficult skills. Third, though workers report a higher willingness to acquire new skills, the actual acquisition of advanced skills is rare. This means there may exist some constraint for them to acquire skills, such as teaching resources. Finally, comparing the information and role model intervention, the treatment effects of the latter display a larger heterogeneity. Role model backfires in certain cases. This means the effectiveness of a role model largely depends on how the individuals perceive the role model.