domenica 22 maggio 2016

HIGHER WAGES FOR A BETTER LIFE

We are going to analyze two different companies involved in the same industry and the wages of their employees. Decathlon is one of the worst company that is doing little or nothing to ensure workers. Inditex is trying to do something to increase wages, but it isn't doing enough yet.

DECATHLON
Decathlon is one of the world’s largest sporting goods retailers that belongs to Oxylane group. Their products can be bought directly through their stores located all over the world or also online through their online sellers. The position of the company on the living wage is critical because Oxylane hasn’t implemented any responsible policy that will allow the payment of living wage to workers yet.

Oxylane has carried out a few actions to promote freedom of association or worker empowerment; indeed they say that during audits they check the workers are free to join any union or collective bargain activities. Oxylane recognizes the principle of a living wage, but the company has not adopted benchmarks to measure this.



The company has signed a joint public statement sent to the prime minister of Bangladesh in June 2012, where they ask a regular rise in the minimum wage and state that there’s a programme based on step-by-step approach, that ensures fair wages to workers, but they didn’t give more information about this specific programme. The lack of details make us think that not a lot is happening in practice, but at least it seems that they have taken into accounts the need to work on wages as a priority, even if they currently lacks any strategy to make a change. In the future, we hope that Oxylane can start to take a more proactive approach to its responsibility to the living wage.


INDITEX


Inditex is a Spanish multinational clothing company headquartered in Galicia. Is one of the biggest fashion group in the world, which has over 7000 stores and 88markets worldwide. It owns more than 100 firms that include the chains of Zara, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Pull & Bear, Stradivarius, Uterque and Oysho. Inditex owns many factories in Spain and outsorces the production in Portugal, Morocco and Turkey. The rest of the production in divided in many countries such as China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Brasil. We have analyzed how peoples are paid by Inditex group and if there is they respect living wage. Inditex says that wages should always be enough to meet at least the basic needs of workers and their families. Any collective agreement on salaries that has been freely elected by trade unions representatives constitutes a fair wage reference for a country, city or factory and this fact is accepted by Inditex.
Its task is to work with trade unions to increase the wages of employees. However, Inditex has cited benchmarks in some countries including Morocco, Spain and Portugal but for Asia no benchmarks have been established. As regard the workers empowerment, Inditex says that suppliers and manufacturers shall ensure that their employees have the right of association without any distinction. Inditex through trainings and meeting with local trade unions in a number of key production countries has worked to proactively promote these rights, through also trainings of suppliers of freedom of association issuing “right to organize” guarantees in Cambodgia, Turkey and India. The company is working on a number of project that address issues fundamentally linked to wages, including freedom of association and short-term contracts. One of the project aims to establish or improve a sustained worker representative system to the social dialogue communication between employer and employees. It has also worked with the International Labour Organization (ILO) with a project aimed to guarantee a living wage breakdown of labour costs. 

For Inditex company the living wage is one of the key priorities for the coming years, but so far the company hasn’t published an overall strategy to deal

specifically with living wage because they have no systematic benchmarking of living wages standards. Despite everything Inditex continued to guarantee its responsibility to ensure workers are paid a living wage with its task to freedom of association. The firm hopes that the work with ILO on “proper calculation of living wages in different sourcing countries” will make an important step. The living-wage benchmarks that Inditex did provide for Europe and Morocco only were very low, just above the minimum wage; It would be more than possible for the company to look at improving wages in the short term, alongside its programme of trade union rights. This would require a clear, time-bound strategy for reaching a living-wage level in its key supplier factories in major production countries. Unfortunately, to date, Inditex has been reluctant to engage with the Asia Floor Wage proposal. Given its commitment to engagement and the buying power, the company would be a good candidate for working with the trade unions involved and testing the implementation of the Asia Floor Wage benchmark.


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Written by: Francesco Mura, Matteo Speroni and Simone Anzani

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