The ETN Living Wage Wednesdays aims to increase our members’ knowledge about living wages, and provide practical advice and inspiration as to how a purchasing company can work to enable and implement the payment of living wages in their supply chain. The series entails members meetings with presentations by external experts, to enable dialogue, discussions and sharing of lessons learned and best practice. We aim to keep the sessions practical, leaving substantial time for questions from our members, to strive towards providing relevant knowledge for your company, supply chain and business model.

Living Wage Wednesdays – Fairtrade International on living income

Speaker: Wilbert Flinterman, Senior Advisor Worker’s Rights and Trade Union Relations at Fairtrade International.

Wilbert will join our Living Wage Wednesdays to talk about how Fairtrade International works with living income for farmers at the raw material level. This will cover sectors ranging from food and farming to textiles. He will touch upon how this is incorporated in the work of Fairtrade and certification of products, as well as the lessons learned and examples of best practice that Fairtrade has experienced through this work.

Fairtrade International has been advocating for Living Wages in agricultural and garment supply chains since 2012. In this webinar focus will be on Fairtrade’s work to deal with low wages in agriculture. By promoting the concept and uniform measurement of Living Wages, initiating collaboration between standard schemes and conducting various interventions through its standards and programmes, Fairtrade has made a distinct difference in origins of Fairtrade products.

During this webinar you will hear about Fairtrade’s successes and challenges, opportunities and threats in this area of work. You will hear examples from the banana, floriculture and tea sectors. You will hear how designing effective measures depends on an understanding of wage setting institutions, supply chain conditions and local economic realities. How there is no silver bullet and why a Living Wage remains a moving target and elusive in some cases. How lasting impact for workers should be pursued and cosmetic solutions should be avoided. And finally, how the issue of low wages in supply chains cannot be addressed effectively without trade unions and trade justice.

The event is for members of the Joint Ethical Trading Initiatives and it is free.