Fair Wages

What is a sufficient wage to cover basic needs and reasonable savings and expenditure?

To begin investigating this question, we commissioned an NGO to carry out a pilot project on fair wages in Indonesia. Their findings were presented in a suite of reports at two workshops in 2003 in Indonesia and the USA. Read the full text of the reports on our corporate website.

The Indonesian workshop was an opportunity to hear from a range of stakeholders and based on that and the reports, we continue to define a strategy that supports improved wages and benefits.

Fair wage strategy

We have been working with our strategic business partners to promote a wage-setting mechanism that:

• Is transparent and has direct input by the workers, ideally through negotiation or collective bargaining, or through alternative legal means, such as a workers’ council or welfare committee
• Benchmarks basic pay at a level that is higher than the local minimum wage
• Acknowledges and rewards workers for productivity gains
• Includes and takes into account data on general cost of living and workers' needs
• Is part of a broader and much improved human resources management system
• Meets in full all legally mandated benefits
• Where practical, promotes and supports the development of worker cooperatives.

• business and
  report overview
• vision and
  governance
• engaging our
  stakeholders
• managing our
  supply chain
• protecting the
  environment
• working with
  the community
• our
  employees