Highlights of the living wage report
A new report summarizing last fall’s Living Wage Symposium calls for the creation of a multi-university partnership, or consortium, to carry out research and pilot projects in several countries related to living wages and workplace monitoring.
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Related resources: Report calls for partnership on living wages, sweatshops UW-Madison and Sweatshops (Background stories and information) |
Specifically, the report recommends several areas for research:
- Measuring consumption prices for workers and what prevailing wages in the industry will buy.
- The demand elasticity in the logo apparel industry.
- The industry’s cost structure, especially labor costs contained in products.
- The “ripple effects” of higher wage standards, both positive and negative.
- How best to monitor and enforce any agreements reached on wages and labor standards.
“The immediate purposes would be to further understanding of consumption costs and wage levels in some logo apparel supplying factories and regions, to provide for and encourage ongoing research into the economic effects of living wages, and to explore the best mechanisms for monitoring supplier compliance with agreed codes of conduct,” says the report.
The university consortium should be created this spring to plan its research and pilot projects, which should be carried out from June 1, 2000, to June 30, 2001, the report says.
Other findings from the symposium are outlined in the 46-page report. For example:
- Considerable progress can be made on measuring consumption costs, but living wage determinations are difficult to make and somewhat arbitrary. However, they can be made realistically and compared to industry wages, minimum wages and specific poverty lines per country.
- There are positive and negative aspects to paying higher wages. Positive aspects include better health and well-being of workers and possible productivity gains. Negative aspects include the loss of employment if wages are set too high.
- Most student participants favor the Worker Rights Consortium over the Fair Labor Association to conduct monitoring and enforce workplace standards, while many universities are reviewing both groups.
The WRC, a student-sponsored effort, is still in development, while the FLA counts as members more than 120 universities, industry leaders and human rights groups. The FLA has established a board of directors, a staff and an executive director, and is also in the formative phase of actually setting up monitoring mechanisms. UW–Madison is a provisional member of the FLA and is reviewing the WRC as a possible alternative.