For the first time, a large scale survey took place in 2020-2021, just before the global pandemic, with physical visits of 45 suppliers and interviews of more than 1100 employees in all regions of Italy, from the north, center and south of the country. Additional surveys were also carried out in 2021.
New Release
JOINT FWN-OECD PUBLICATION ON THE LIVING WAGE
Following a new Fair Wage assessment at its Headquarters in Hong Kong, main energy supplier CLP had its Fair Wage certification renewed for 2022. Its three entities* were certified as ‘Fair Wage employers’.
*CLPeSolutions (CLPeS); CLPHoldings (CLPH); and CLP Power Hong Kong (CLPPHK).
To know more about why fair wage are important for investor and companies, read ‘Fair Wages – A key to effective social capital management’

Investors have made a call to brands to start designing a Living wage/Fair wage strategy. The Dow Jones Sustainability Index in its yearly questionnaire to companies added two questions on the living wage that are now included in companies’ sustainability scoring. Brands are requested not only to make a public commitment to pay a living wage but also to implement policies to make such living wage payment happening among direct employees but also franchisees and suppliers. Other investors are also requesting brands to put in place a strategy in this area see for instance the investors’ platform: https://www.livingwage.nl

This book explains the Fair Wage methodology and how companies and other stakeholders can make progress in the field through a coherent set of fair wage dimensions and indicators.
A new research and forthcoming book provide new empirical evidence on wages in global supply chains through three complementary sources of information and data: a global suppliers’ survey, 31 qualitative case studies, and a global buyers’ survey. These three sources of information collected through ILO-ETI surveys show for the first time how purchasing practices influence suppliers’ behaviour in terms of wages, working time, temporary work and outsourcing.
In July-August 2021, the FWN carried out a large survey among workers collecting Mica, this shiny silicate mineral used as a thermal or electrical insulator by many sectors like automobile.
Challenged with the management of large workforces, as well as intensive and multisectors supply chains, several global companies requested the development of a wage standard that ensured sustainability within the imperatives of corporate performance.
THE FAIR WAGE
APPROACH

Fair Wage is an economically rigorous standard and methodology designed to assess, develop and optimize wage policies. Fair Wage encompasses typical sustainability dimensions like Living Wage and Equal Pay but is far more comprehensive and most importantly systematically correlates those indicators with performance and profitability indicators.

The Fair Wage standard is structured around and defined by 12 dimensions, which covers comprehensively the entire spectrum of wage indicators. The Fair Wage approach has a demonstrated impact track record of sustainable performance increases.

BECOME A FAIR WAGE EMPLOYER

Fair Wage offers comprehensive services to companies and brands committed to enhancing their business through a sustainable wage policy. From simple assessments and remediation plans that can then also lead them to full certification, Fair Wage has developed systematic tools and methods adapted to all scales of implementation.

Candidate companies are provided all the necessary tools and framework to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their wage-fixing system and therefore, to correct their shortcomings in this complex field more easily.

THE BENEFITS

Fair Wage is a powerful HR tool offering a clear competitive advantage in the market place.

Fair Wage is a widely recognized sustainability standard. By adopting the Fair Wage approach in your company, and enhancing your wage-fixing processes with sustainable practices, you show a commitment to balanced relations and to constructive economic and social impact. This is a strong competitive advantage for your brand, that you can integrate into your sustainability strategy, and also to your marketing strategy and operations. Whether you use Fair Wage as a monitoring tool, as a remediation methodology or commit to the certification, Fair Wage will strengthen your brand.

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The Fair Wage methodology helps you identify precisely the strong and weak points of your wage policy, the prime tool for the management of your human resources. This then impact workers’ motivation, productivity and also the quality of goods and services provided. Fair Wage uses correlations of the type of tasks to the wage structure, as well as data gathering from the labor force itself. This allows your human resources manager to pinpoint exactly how to better incentivize your workforce for optimal productivity. Human talents are the strongest assets of any corporation, Fair Wage gives you the tools to benefit fully from their potential.

Fair Wage helps you structure your wage policy in a coherent and sustainable format, with a focus towards strongly incentivizing your workforce. Outside talents are very sensitive to wage policies and a well-structured and promising offer is a decisive advantage to attract the best. Once recruited, Fair Wage will give you the monitoring tools necessary to inform you regularly of the motivation of your workforce. This allows you to fine tune your wage policies to maintain a strong level of commitment and retain your talents in the long run.

An increasing number of investment institutions look carefully at the sustainability indicators of a company before considering an investment. A strong wage policy is a decisive indicator of a sustainable enterprise and a valuable characteristic for any corporation. With a commitment to sustainable development, you also get access to funds that exclusively invest in companies branded and structured around those best practices. A Fair Wage label will allow you to have a wider number of financing sources and will increase the value of your company, thereby allowing for more attractive conditions.

Example of investors’ commitment toward Fair Wage / Living Wage››

Fair Wage, a priority for your Sustainability strategy››

OUR SERVICES

If you would like one or more of these activities for your company, please fill the form below and we will contact you.

FWN methodological note:

HOW TO CALCULATE A LIVING WAGE?
Read more >>

Get the access to our unique online living wage database:
it provides living wage thresholds for almost all countries (nearly 200) and also living wage thresholds in more than 2000 individual regions/provinces/cities.
Get a living wage gap analysis:
from wage data of your company, we will be able to provide you the eventual average living wage gap in your company, but also this gap by gender and different categories of workers. You will also know what would be the costs for catching up to a living wage payment for all your employees.
Be certified as a living wage employer:
After the living wage gap analysis, you can ask the FWN to validate the results from wage data of the company and be certified a living wage employer on your different markets.
Have a full fair wage assessment:
Based on a survey among a representative sample of workers and a management survey (both being carried out online), it will provide you the performance of your company on the 12 dimensions around which the FWN defines a Fair Wage -including on the living wage. It will allow you to see what are your strength while identifying areas for improvements. If you reach 70% of the maximum score you will be certified as a Fair Wage employer.
Fair Wage assessments
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Whether your company is looking for an external analysis of its wage practices or has committed to their enhancement, Fair Wage starts with an assessment of the wage practices in relation to the Fair Wage framework. Our economically rigorous method -The Fair Wage Approach- was developed to give robust wage indicators to identify a comprehensive and overall assessment of an enterprise’s performance in the wage area.

Fair Wage remediation
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Fair Wage team comprises best world experts on wages, and also works with a network of extremely competent consulting firms trained and ready to deliver remediation plans and operational implementations to issues detected during the Fair Wage assessments. Remediation can take various forms, from written recommendations, seminars and trainings, to in-house counselling and coaching and will be followed up by successive assesments.

Fair Wage certification
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The powerful branding emphasis of the Fair Wage Label is available for companies with exemplary wage policies and practices. The Fair Wage Scientific Committee performs a control of the assessment and delivers the label if eligibility is confirmed. Label licensing requires a renewal of the certification every two years, through successive Fair Wage assessments.

On-line living wage database
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Fair Wage has developed living wage references for every country and geographical region in the world, offering a balanced aggregate living wage amount, pondered with the ratio between family sizes and number of income earners per family. Through a combination of surveys among workers to better capture their family expenditures, and surveys among local markets/shops to get the right prices of basic commodities, the database offers local thresholds that closely match local living costs. Recognized at International level and used by most brands and suppliers, this database is adjusted on a regular basis and provides living wage thresholds in almost all countries in the world (nearly 200) and in more than 2,000 individual regions/provinces/states/ cities within those countries.

Living wage gap analysis
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This rich living wage database allows the FWN to carry out living wage gap analyses for brands and their individual companies/suppliers. After sharing its wage data by employees on a secured and anonymous platform, each company receives an individual report that provides the average living wage gap in the company, the percentage of workers still being paid below the living wage, with also disaggregated results by gender and categories of employees. It also allows the company to have a precise evaluation of the costs that a catching up process to the living wage payment for all employees would represent. The FWN also provides recommendations on how to close the gap in a balanced and progressive way.

Living wage certification
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After a living wage gap analysis is completed and verified, and reveals that the company is paying all its workers wages that are at least at the living wage benchmark, it is ready to ask for the living wage certification. The FWN will carry out random surveys among workers to check that the wage data communicated by the company well match the data provided by the workers themselves. If the workers confirm that they are all paid at least the living wage, the company receives the living wage certification. Provided by individual business units and by markets, a brand can become a global living wage employer if it receives the living wage certification for all the markets it operates.

THE FAIR WAGE LABEL
a distinctive sign of quality and ethical values in the area of wage setting
The obtaining of the Fair Wage label both gives a clear competitive advantage in the market place and works as a robust HR tool.
As a result of the certification process the label constitutes a guarantee that your company is developing sustainable wage practices and that your employees benefit from a set of exemplary wage setting procedures.
1 the Fair Wage label can be incorporated in all the goods directly produced by the company
2 The company is also allowed to use the Fair Wage label for marketing purposes
3 the obtaining of the label is publicized in the Fair Wage Network and all relevant communication channels
“The Fair Wage Network offers the most reliable database on the living wage, covering an impressive number of countries, and allowed us to complete The Circle’s Living Wage report that we also presented to the EU Commission”
Co-founder and Creative Director of Eco-Age
Founder of the Green Carpet Challenge (GCC)
Founding member of Annie Lennox’s ‘The Circle
INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION: IDH recognizES Fair WaGE NETWORK LIVING WAGES

The FWN thresholds on the living wage have been recognized by IDH at the beginning of 2021, as highlighted by its ‘Living Wage Identifier’
REASONS TO TRUST US

The Fair Wage Network team is internationally recognised as one of the most knowledgable groups to address wages and related issues at company level and in global supply chain. We have a unique legitimacy based on cooperation with all stakeholders and their contribution to international debates on wages. Focusing on pay systems, furthermore on wage-fixing and wage-adjustment mechanisms that benefits both the business and the workers, we propose a holistic approach to address wage.

The Fair wage Network has established all measures necessary to ensure trust and confidentiality.

Wage data communicated are made anonymous before being passed on for the statistical analysis.

The partners involved such as the Certification Bodies accredited by the Fair Wage Network base their business model and mode of operation on the code of integrity.

In addition, the Fair Wage Network has developed a unique platform, which encapsulates all confidential data in a confined and secure environment.

Our unique database is kept up to date by permanent data collection by a group of researchers. It contains all thresholds on the living wage and prevailing wages calculated by statistical offices, research institutes and non-governmental organizations around the world. It then leads to a very rich set of results that helps the company to assess its wage levels, identify root causes and put in place the necessary remediation steps.

We have more than 25 years of experience in the field. We group all the actors companies, NGOs, workers’ representatives, and researchers working in this field. Assessments and verifications are entrusted to certification bodies operating on a code of integrity.

Our success is the success of our partners, who have already placed ‘fair wage’ or ‘fair compensation’ of ‘fair living wage’ as a major pillar of their sustainability strategy.

ADIDAS

The Fair Wage Assessments have helped us improve the way we monitor compensation and pay issues. We have integrated the Fair Wage idea into our supplier training on Human Resources Management Systems that helped in monitoring and measuring wage performance and remediation practices

H&M

Fair wage are something the whole industry must drive

IKEA

The Fair Wage Network uses a consistent approach, which we can apply to many countries. It includes a focus on wages, along with other critical factors such as working hours, social benefits, equity, costs to workers and the opportunity for progression. This approach is inclusive, drawing on input from workers, managers and external sources.

We want to use the fair wage assessment methodology in pilots in both our own operations and supply chain, and scale this up…

UNILEVER

Since 2015, FWN have provided us with access to their global Living Wage database. This gives us an objective external source of the living wage amount for each of the countries (109) where we have employees.

FWN have helped us develop our understanding of living wages, how many of our existing compensation arrangements deliver fair wages and how they fit in to our overall Framework for Fair Compensation.

CONTACT

call us or email us
info@fair-wage.com
Avenue des Nations #100
Geneva, Switzerland