Safeguarding Living Wages Post-Covid

1.    We are committed to solving the issues of worker vulnerability and modern slavery, influenced by brands’ purchasing practices and accelerated by order cancellations from Covid-19 and leverage achievement of living wages which are transformative and necessary to sustain and uplift communities.

2.    We are proposing a project which critically evaluates brands/retailers purchasing practices, identifies interventions and collaborations across sectors/geographies/governments and provides greater support for workers’ representation and sector collective bargaining by leveraging our marketplace and content strategy to guide suppliers in implementing Living Wages projects. With our technology, we are able to surface ESG related news (i.e. Covid hotspots, strikes), suppliers’ sustainability credentials, production capacities and capabilities.

3.    The project elevates humanity by empowering suppliers and garment workers and shifting the narrative as they are often gravely impacted by the decisions of brand/retailers.

There are 60 million garment workers globally and so far there is no solid evidence that any of them are earning a living wage.

The lack of visibility of Western brands and retailers into their factories, dispersed globally mainly across Asia-Pacific, has allowed for labor violations and abusive social and environmental practices, such as forced labour, child labour, involuntary overtime for workers where women are most vulnerable, and unauthorized sub-contracting. 

An obstacle to achieving living wages is a lack of dialogue between brands/retailers and suppliers and good purchasing practices. This project aims to facilitate dialogue and in tandem with this, use data to expose gaps in capacity.

According to Care International, the garment industry employs 60mn workers globally, and 75% are women. Women in the garment industry are disproportionately represented in the most vulnerable, marginalised, low paid and impoverished forms of work. This is pre-Covid. The current circumstances mean that these vulnerabilities are accelerated.

In Bangladesh, one of the largest apparel exporters, the sector accounts for 84% of the country’s export revenue, nearly 2.5 million workers are impacted by this crisis as the brands/retailers they produce for owe a collective $3bn+ for paid for and shipped orders.

The project would highlight those brands/retailers who have reneged on their contract agreements with suppliers, exposing critical gaps in capacity and capability, surface suppliers who have abided by industry defined best-practices in response to Covid-19, and expose the facilities that are operational and have the verified capacity and capability to produce, as this will indicate the ability to leverage living wages and treat workers with decency and respect. Alongside this, our project will encourage engagement with IDH Salary Matrix to access current wages to identify interventions that help accelerate achievement of living wages and also provide critical education around living wages definitions and how they vary across the supply chain.

This project aims to meaningfully improve capacity of suppliers across global value chains and also safeguard workers’ agency, access to living wages and social protections. Garment workers often times do not have savings that offer them financial protections in times of crisis and the pandemic has made this problem more acute. In Bangladesh, for example, workers as they are faced with having to protest non-payment of wages and contravening lockdown measures and risking infection to provide for themselves and their families—a choice no one should have to make. To understand workers’ needs more fully, focus groups will be established consisting of (ideally) garment workers, brands/retailers, suppliers, trade union representatives, and multi-stakeholder initiatives like Fair Wear Foundation and Better Buying Initiative. Our project addresses their needs by using data to leverage and expose the gaps and obstacles in achieving living wages.

Our project tackles the core dimensions of the prize head on.  We are building tools and capacity in SME businesses in emerging markets to consider living wage and financial security for their workers as strategic issues that will benefit business, workers and customers collectively; we are providing digital tools that enable these businesses to connect to global customers and we are building connectivity opportunities that mean sustainable business, and fair social and labor practices get rewarded despite economic downturns and demand and supply side shocks.