The Garment Worker Diaries blog posts are back and this week we’re spotlighting the #OpenDiaries social media campaign as told to us through the eyes of one of the campaign’s co-managers, Evey Gutierrez, our outgoing communications intern. We’ll miss Evey being a part of our team. She has helped lay the groundwork in Bangladesh for what we hope will be an important and ongoing component of all worker diaries initiatives in every country.
What Evey points out and what the #OpenDiaries campaign has helped us to understand is that allowing workers to share their own words and their own images with the recipients of their data brings vitality to what would otherwise be a one-sided discussion. The purpose of Worker Diaries and the #OpenDiaries campaign is to establish a conversation between workers and other stakeholders. We can ask the people who make our clothes what they think about climate change, or about whether they find joy in their work, and those people can and will answer us. They can also prompt us to think about their work and life situations in different ways with the questions they invite us to ask and the photos they send us.
If you haven’t seen our most recent #OpenDiaries post yet, we encourage you to scroll through the slides to get a worker’s perspective on garment industry solidarity. We also encourage you to follow us on our Worker Diaries Instagram page to make sure you never miss a post.
Thanks to everyone who has followed us so far and submitted a question (you can always submit more questions by writing to questions@workerdiaries.org). Thanks to Evey for helping to establish such an important conversation. And perhaps most of all, thanks to the workers for sharing their lives with us and continuing that conversation.
