RMG & Manufacturing
A Bangla worker helpline that actually gets used: pay and leave questions answered, grievances captured anonymously, evidence your buyers accept.
A garment exporter's customers are foreign buyers who write in English, so the Bangla contact problem in this sector is not customer service. It is the workforce. Tens of thousands of workers per group have ordinary questions, how much they were paid and why it differs from last month, how much leave they have, whether an attendance day was recorded, where their provident fund stands, and the only route to an answer is a queue outside an HR office during working hours. Most people give up, and the question becomes a rumour, a line stoppage or an exit. Alongside that sits a compliance obligation: buyers require a functioning grievance mechanism, and the industry's own RSC channel covers occupational safety and health only, with non-OSH grievances an open and contested gap. We deploy a Bangla line that answers the ordinary questions from your HR and payroll systems, and takes grievances anonymously into a tracked, timestamped, exportable record.
The problem before the product.
A payslip question has no channel
A worker who thinks their pay is short can queue at HR during working hours or let it go. At scale that is thousands of unresolved questions a month, and unresolved pay questions are how unrest starts.
The grievance mechanism covers safety only
The RSC channel handles occupational safety and health. Harassment, wage disputes, supervisor conduct and leave denial fall outside it, which leaves the category that most often escalates with the weakest route.
Anonymity is the whole problem
A grievance process that runs through the worker's own line supervisor is not a grievance process. Without a genuinely anonymous channel, reporting rates say nothing about what is happening on the floor.
Audits ask for evidence, not intentions
Buyer social audits want to see that a channel exists, that workers know about it, that complaints were logged and that they were closed within a defined time. A suggestion box produces none of that.
Literacy and language are real constraints
An app or a web form assumes reading ability, a smartphone and data. Voice in Bangla, on any handset, assumes none of those, which is why the channel has to be a phone line first.
Built against your
systems of record.
Worker helpline in Bangla
Payslip breakdown, overtime calculation, leave balance, attendance records and provident fund status, verified by worker ID and read from your HR and payroll systems. Available outside shift hours, which is when workers can actually call.
Anonymous grievance intake
A structured, Bangla, anonymous route that bypasses the line supervisor entirely. Each case gets a reference the worker can call back with to check progress without ever identifying themselves.
A compliance-grade audit trail
Every case timestamped at raise, acknowledgement, action and closure, categorised, and exportable for buyer social audits and your own CAP tracking. This is the artefact an auditor asks for.
Escalation that routes past the accused
Category-based routing so a complaint about a supervisor never lands with that supervisor, with time-bound escalation to compliance or senior management when a case sits unactioned.
Outbound to the floor
Shift change, wage disbursement, holiday and safety drill notifications in Bangla by voice and SMS, reaching workers who do not read notice boards.
Your systems stay yours.
Nothing here is a replacement platform. The engine reads from and writes to what you already run.
- HR and payroll systems, including local HRMS platforms
- Attendance, access control and biometric time systems
- Provident fund and benefits records
- Compliance and CAP tracking systems used for buyer audits
- ERP and production planning systems
- SMS gateways and IVR, which reach any handset
What it will not do.
The constraints are the product. A system that cannot be audited cannot be approved.
- Anonymity is enforced in the system design: for an anonymous case there is no stored identity to disclose, rather than an identity we promise not to reveal.
- Append-only case records with timestamps at every stage, which is what makes the trail usable as audit evidence.
- Exportable complaint registers aligned to what buyer social audits and the UN Guiding Principles' access-to-remedy expectations look for.
- Deployable on-premise, which matters for groups that will not put worker grievance data in a foreign cloud.
- Worker PII masked before any prompt leaves your boundary.
- The engine records and routes grievances. It does not adjudicate them, and no automated system should.
Why this sector
works differently here.
The regulators, the systems and the operating reality that decide whether a deployment in this sector actually survives contact with your environment.
The RSC channel is OSH only
The RMG Sustainability Council has run the Occupational Safety and Health Complaints Mechanism since June 2020, taking over the Accord's Bangladesh operations, and it processes OSH complaints only. Non-OSH complaints fall outside its scope and are not investigated or verified by it. Whether that mandate should widen is actively disputed between the RSC and BGMEA, so the gap is not closing on its own.
Workers already use a phone line to complain
The RSC operates an upgraded IVR and digital complaints system and has received thousands of complaints through it. The behaviour is established, which removes the usual adoption risk. What is missing is a channel for everything the RSC does not cover.
Buyer contracts carry enforcement teeth
The Accord is a binding agreement between brands and unions, and complaint and remediation data can be used to start enforcement against a brand. That is why your buyers push the obligation down to you, and why evidence of a working channel has commercial value.
Voice beats apps on this floor
A grievance app assumes a smartphone, data and reading ability. A Bangla voice line on a feature phone assumes none of them, which is the difference between a channel that exists and a channel that is used.
The scale is the argument
RMG is the largest export sector in the country, around 80 percent of merchandise exports, and the largest formal employer of Bangla-speaking workers. A per-worker improvement that is small individually is very large across a group.
The first build, in about 30 days.
One factory or one group unit, two intent sets: payslip and leave queries, plus anonymous grievance intake. Phone line and SMS, Bangla only.
- Worker ID verification against your HR system
- Payslip breakdown, overtime, leave balance and attendance lookups
- Anonymous grievance capture with a callback reference
- Category routing and time-bound escalation rules
- An exportable case register for your next buyer audit
Scoping everything at once is how these projects fail. These come after the first build is answering real calls.
- Provident fund and benefits, usually a second phase
- Multi-unit rollout across a group
- Production and ERP intents
- Outbound floor notifications
If three of these are true, book the diagnostic.
Workers queue at the HR office to ask about their pay.
Your grievance channel is a locked box that is rarely opened.
A buyer audit has flagged your grievance mechanism or its records.
You cannot show how long a complaint took to close.
Pay or leave disputes have caused a line stoppage in the last year.
Your workforce is largely Bangla-only and not reliably literate.
Our buyers already require a grievance mechanism. Does this satisfy it?
It gives you the three things audits actually test: an accessible channel workers can use, records showing complaints were logged and closed within a defined time, and evidence workers were told it exists. Whether a specific buyer's standard is met is their determination, not ours, and we would not claim otherwise.
How can it be genuinely anonymous and still let the worker follow up?
The case gets a reference number with no identity attached to it. The worker calls back and quotes the reference to hear the status. There is no stored identity to leak, which is a stronger guarantee than a promise of confidentiality.
Will workers actually use a phone line?
They already do. The industry's existing OSH complaints mechanism runs on IVR and has taken thousands of complaints. The behaviour exists; the coverage does not.
What stops it being used to attack a supervisor unfairly?
Nothing, and no grievance channel can. The engine captures and routes, it does not judge. What it does give you is a consistent, timestamped record of what was alleged and when, which protects both sides better than an informal complaint does.
A diagnostic, then a written scope.
Forty-five minutes on your call mix and your systems. You get the findings in writing inside 72 hours, and they are yours whether or not we work together.