A Global Living Wage

By Helga Birgden

While undeveloped countries have lower wages, spending power is also lower. The solution - a wage setting formula that combines the two.

The "living wage" is more than compliance with the rules of legal minimums. It encompasses fundamental workers' rights, fair wages, a safe and healthy workplace, reasonable hours of work, decent living standards, support for community infrastructure and commitment to community economic development.

Corporations, governments and other institutions to this day fail to remunerate their workers in the full and proper sense of a living wage, seen most acutely in two thirds of the countries of the world.

(Ethical Investor, issue 26, September 2003)