That is the opinion of Mr. Nguyen Duc Manh, Hoa Tho Textile and Garment Corporation - who was recently awarded a Creative Labor Certificate by the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor at the forum "Promoting the creative potential of workers", one of the activities of the 2025 Creative Labor Festival at the General Confederation.
Improving working conditions for workers through initiatives
Over the past 5 years, with personal efforts and support from the Corporation's Board of Directors and encouragement from the Vietnam Textile and Garment Trade Union, Mr. Nguyen Duc Manh has researched and implemented more than 50 technical innovation initiatives, many of which have been widely applied inside and outside the unit. One of the outstanding initiatives is to improve the JUKI AMS 221EN-3020 programming machine into an automatic vest loading and unloading machine.
In order to improve production efficiency and overcome limitations in the one-spoke bag loading and unloading process, Mr. Manh has designed and constructed an automatic support system integrated on the programming machine. A notable point of the initiative is improving the apparatus and working space. The solution to improve the bag loading and unloading process using programming machines has been officially applied since February 2023 at veston Garment Factory under Hoa Tho Textile Joint Stock Corporation. After a period of research and testing, Mr. Manh has synchronously deployed a system including a plastic clutch with a compressed air cylinder, an automatic controller and a rear-wrap - sewing structure. The application of improvements helps completely replace manual operation in the previous one-spoke sewing and unloading process, which depended heavily on workers' skills and often had technical errors. After a short time of implementation, the productivity has increased from about 2,057 products to 4,800 products/day; simpler operations, stable sewing quality, significantly reducing wrinkles, fabric pulling and product Sequence errors.
Barriers to be addressed to create more initiatives
From reality, Mr. Nguyen Duc Manh shared about some barriers in innovation. In which, the thinking of "working for a salary" is still popular because it is not clear to see the connection between initiatives and income and benefits; the nature of repetitive work and high production pressure makes workers have few opportunities to experiment with new ways of doing things.
From that reality, Mr. Manh suggested that workers - those who are most knowledgeable about the production process - should proactively learn, apply technology and boldly propose new solutions. On the side of the Union and the enterprise, Mr. Manh expressed his desire to create an environment to encourage creativity, arrange resources for testing, timely rewards, organize creative playgrounds and build a research data warehouse on a digital platform to share across the industry. For the State, it is necessary to continue to innovate education, focusing on training creative thinking for workers right from school.
