 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the fourth and last in the current round of our webinars profiling some of the research work that we're doing within the Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellowship Programme at CISL. Really, really pleased you could join us and I'm sure this is going to be a very exciting topic from two very exciting people here at CISL, Anna Barford and Marina Zerilla. The topic is super interesting. It's on living wages in complex value chains and how companies are adopting them and I'll say just a tiny bit of introduction about that in the second. What I wanted to say first of all is that the actual program from where this work comes out of is called the Global Sustainability Fellowship Programme, the Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellowship Programme and that is supported by a range of different companies and foundations to enable us to conduct research work which is very focused on problem solving within the business and policy community. It has strong academic foundations but it is also very deliberately targeting impact in the real world and I think hopefully this presentation from Anna and Marina will illustrate that. This particular research is supported very generously by Unilever. Some of the previous presentations we've had in this series have been from other companies like AstraZeneca, from Sainsbury's and others. This one's supported by Unilever. It's independent research however which draws on the best approach which the university and universities generally have adopted in really getting to grips with global evidence and thinking behind the topic area. So hopefully this will be of interest to you. Now I did notice, I'm Jake Reynolds by the way, from CSL. I'm responsible for our research programme here at the Institute. I did notice looking at the participation we have banks, investors, insurance companies, retailers, manufacturers, foundations, academic organisations. It's a usefully diverse group and has been in each of these webinars which we are providing and I think in some ways diversity is particularly well suited to this topic of living wage because every organisation has to be thinking about this. This is an issue for all organisations. In fact not only private sector but public sector too and indeed not only the organisations directly but their client bases. Who are they working with? Who are they working for? And also their supply chains and in fact their stakeholder communities generally. So I'm hoping very much that the topic when Anna and Maruna present it will elicit thinking in your own minds about how this whole era of living wages might be applied in your own context or in your own industries or communities and that you will wish to pose questions to them for probably the half now that we'll have after their presentation and if you please could enter those questions that you have into the into the go to meeting question space that would be fantastic. We will then extract them and I can play them back to my colleagues here after their presentation. So just in terms of how we what we're going to cover today and exactly the topic area, fair wages have been on the agenda for an awfully long time. It's surprising in some ways that we have you know over a century but it's surprising that despite the international commitments from everywhere from the UN downwards we still have millions of people living on what you might describe as poverty wages and this has costs for obviously for the workers themselves, the families and the businesses that they work for too. It's always been a concern but in the wake of the COVID pandemic and many other social movements which have been you know very vocal and very important over the last few years socialists have really surged up the corporate agenda and living wage is among them and it's receiving considerable attention at the current time and some companies as we know including Unilever have made bold commitments to apply them right the way through their supply networks to attempt to end work poverty. So Anna and Marina will walk us through what living wages are, why they're needed, they'll provide a couple of case studies and an honest assessment I think of some of the issues that companies are currently facing as they seek to apply them. Anna is a Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellow and her research into the potential for decent work in the circular economy has led her to focus on living wages as a key metric of decent work and this complements her wider interests in addressing a deficit in jobs in lower income countries and how young people can get by when the labor market demand for them is weak. On the other hand Marina is a research assistant here at CSL she's focused on living wages across global supply chains and she has an unfil in development studies from the University of Cambridge and experience of working in corporate social responsibility and development consulting and her academic interests lie at if you like the intersection of economic development climate change and inequalities. So having just explained a tiny bit about the the fellowship program itself introduced the topic area and the two people who are going to present it I'd like to hand over to I think Anna probably you'll kick off now we will come back to audience questions afterwards so if I could just reiterate do put your questions into the system and I will attempt my best to to moderate them after the presentation so over to you Anna. Excellent and thank you very much Jake and welcome everyone to our webinar it's great that you're able to make time today to join us so Marina has been working with me since last summer and we've really been trying to understand this new wave of commitments to paying living wage is so until until a few years ago quite a lot of living wage commitments were really focused directly on the organization and its direct employees and then to some extent there the people they were contracting to do work but then kind of in the past few years has been this kind of new wave of commitments which are really looking at living wages but actually can throughout supply chains or throughout value chains which is a very exciting departure as Jake said because of the potential it brings to influence norms around pay and the actual practice of pay and to shift us from what to date has been an overwhelming kind of rhetoric of you know how much can we get for how much for how little money from workers to a way of thinking about pay in terms of how do we address make sure that workers are paid enough to address their needs and to pay for the basics in life as well as have some something to spare for for if there's a crisis or an emergency as well so it's really a kind of a shift in what what businesses and other organizations are looking for in terms of what they pay and why they're thinking about paying more than they might have previously been aiming to. We're speaking to you from the University of Cambridge as you know and I'm really pleased to say you know this isn't a movement which is limited to corporations so the university started paying the real living wage in 2014 but then in 2018 they actually pushed it up above the UK real living wage to a higher level of 10 pounds an hour which is the Cambridge living wage which was a kind of more locally defined living wage and the reason they did this is because as some of you may know the cost of living in Cambridge is higher than the UK average so then using a UK level living wage doesn't necessarily give people enough to live in the Cambridge context and this is why we're talking about living wages in plural because the cost of living varies so much place to place and this is one of the complications as well that when you start thinking about how you're going to pay your workers through supply chains you have to work out the different costs of living in different parts of the world very often especially when those supply chains are very extended you might be wondering like why is this an issue why have we not solved it already as Jake said you know we've had more than 100 years of people demanding fair pay for the work that people have done and you know to some extent that has been addressed statutory minimum wages are already kind of playing a really important role in bringing up the minimum wage but it's not to date it's not been enough so that's where the kind of the need for voluntary commitments has come in from from corporations in particular which we're speaking about today and like we know low pay is an issue here's some examples of some news headlines which point to some of the issues that we see surrounding low pay so for instance low pay driving poverty and inequality low pay meaning that there's a risk that your workers all leave en masse because they're not actually able to afford to live based on the pay that they're receiving or the risk that workers do stay but they struggle to make ends meet and they really struggle to get by and make a decent life for themselves because they're not paid enough and it's a day to day struggle a day to day stress that they're facing as a result of the low level of pay they're receiving there's also the issue that some companies have pledged to increase pay but it's not always happened and you know sometimes that's it could be for many different reasons but one of the reasons is it can be hard to make sure that money gets to the people that it's intended to go to so there's lots of kind of different issues that people are facing but overall we can see that it's a recurring issue and something that doesn't need to be addressed next slide thank you so just to think a bit more broadly about kind of what what's the issue globally when we're looking at pay currently um 630 million people are in working poverty so just to be really clear this is people who are working they're active in the labour market which you know some rhetoric kind of says you know you should you should work and then that will solve the problem but people who are already working but the level of income they're getting from that work isn't enough to lift them out of poverty and for this particular statistic the the definition is the the line of moderate poverty so 3.2 dollars a day PPP so purchasing power parity just to be really clear this isn't just an issue of lower or middle income countries this is very much a global issue so one example of that is that European workers are also relatively high risk from working poverty so one in 10 European workers is at risk from that and we can see that if we if we compare these numbers we compare the 630 million people in working poverty with the people who are on or below the minimum wage which is 327 million we see that actually there's roughly about 300 million people who are earning above the minimum wage but not enough to lift them out of working poverty so that's a huge gap that we're seeing and again it kind of reiterates the point that the minimum wages on their own aren't enough at present and just to to give a bit more information about this this graph actually shows the percentage of employees who are currently covered by minimum wages and we can see that in some parts of the world particularly the Arab states and Africa the percentage of people covered by minimum wages is really really low under under 30 percent but in no continent 100 percent of employees covered by minimum wages so there's kind of two two big issues around this one is minimum wages don't always exist or they don't necessarily apply to particular groups of workers like particularly informal workers for instance and other issues that they're they're set lower than living wages so they don't they're not at the right level and then the third issue would be compliance as well so even if you're covered in the minimum wages at a good level if employees aren't complying then that also means people fall through the gaps so at this stage we just wanted to share a definition of what we really mean by living wages in some senses it's implicit you know earning enough to live on living wages have been talked about for a really long time so the first written record of this is actually from 1894 when the factory textile factory owner and Mark Oldroyd from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire talked about living wages and the benefits and the need for living wages and you'll notice that on this slide it kind of really flags minimum wages offer something to the employee but they also offer something to the employer so they talk about living wages maintaining the worker in the highest state of industrial efficiency so there's clearly some business benefits in there that you know keeping keeping people well paid is is beneficial to the employer but obviously the main point is it's also beneficial to the employee a more recent definition of which there are many but here's a more recent definition which picks up on similar themes in a broad sense but is that the remuneration for a standard working week should be enough to really provide a worker and their family and so it's not just individual level it's kind of family level with the essentials for a decent life which obviously includes food, water, housing, education, healthcare, transport, clothing and other essentials it also includes providing enough to deal with unexpected events so there's some some potential for saving so there's a financial buffer and we know that people are more exposed to shocks and stresses if they don't have that financial buffer available to them so it's really important so now we just want to actually do a quick poll just for fun to offer a way that we can directly engage with you considering we can't see anyone on this call so Becker's going to set that up but the poll is to do with what's the real living wage in the UK and there's quite a few different definitions of living wage is the water's been muddied somewhat because the government brought out its own living wage which is actually the same as the minimum wage so they could have borrowed that language of living wages and applied it to their minimum wage but the government's own version is lower than the living wage foundations living wage which is carefully calculated every year using a basket of different goods to work out how much it costs to live in the UK and then kind of and then applying that to an average sized family and making some assumptions to work out how much people need to earn as an hourly rate based on the assumption of what they need at the end of a working week so you've got about 30 seconds to answer this question just to keep the pace going and the question is what is the hourly real living wage in the UK so that's not the government one that's the living wage foundations one so please quickly choose what you what you think it would be and then Becker can send in the results okay I think that should be about 30 seconds now Becker do we have some some answers I think we'll find the results in just a moment but I'll get started anyway and we'll see we'll see how well we know the details I appreciate that not everyone will be dialing in from the UK either so particularly difficult question if you're if you're not based here but of the different answers we gave they are all actually set levels of wages within the UK so here we go so no one thought 4.30 thank you Becker 4.30 4.30 is actually one of the wage rates available to us that's what an apprentice would be paid in the UK at present no one chose 6.56 this is the minimum wage in the UK if you're aged 18 to 20 at present we've had some people choosing 8.91 so this is the UK governments what they call the the living wage that's for people aged 23 and over the correct answer was 9.90 for the UK real living wage that's how much that's the absolute minimum so that's the the floor not the ceiling of earnings that they they recommend UK wide and most people said that so well done everyone and then the the top one 11 pounds 5p is actually the hourly rate for the London living wage and the living wage foundation calculates a London living wage because as I'm sure everyone even people not based in the UK know the cost of living in London is is exceptionally high and so it's there's a kind of an extra there's a London waiting which you see with many many jobs as well that there's a London waiting so people earn a bit more so they can afford the cost of living there so yeah perhaps we can move back to our our PowerPoint now but I think that the interesting thing here is that's that's the living wage the real living wage isn't differentiated by age whereas these other ones the minimum wage for 18 to 20 year old and then 20 21 and 22 year olds and then 23 plus is differentiated by age so there's this assumption that you need less money if you're younger which may or may not be true depending on your relationship with your parents some of you've moved out of from home or not and Becca is it possible to go back to their PowerPoint please thank you so so then moving on with the presentation just to say a bit more about the need for for living wages the living wage foundation did a survey of UK workers this year and they found that actually low pay really has a strongly detrimental effect on people's overall quality of life so 42% of workers said it impacted their quality of life negatively 23% found that they'd fallen behind with rental mortgages due to their low pay and 28 centres have trouble affording to heat their homes so we can see like low pay is associated with people not being able to meet these basic needs which we talked about but there's also an impact on businesses so the impact of the business impact of low wages includes details like if people are on low wages they might have poorer health because maybe they're going without much food or they're living in colder homes or they're not able to afford the healthcare that they want to access and people can feel less motivated because they they feel less valued by their employer and this can lead to a loss of workers sometimes that applies to direct employees but it can also apply throughout value chains because if people are working value chains are also exposed to the same stresses and strains and they can also experience poor health and poor well-being it can also lead to higher costs of managing labour issues because if there's very often labour issues and labour disputes concerned pay to some extent and it's often a major major issue kind of within those conversations so if you deal with that by just paying people properly and paying them what they need that can also reduce that particular cost of the businesses there's another risk that businesses face from not paying people a decent level of income is that there might be social controversies that stem from that which can result in ultimately reputational damage which can have impacts on investment and also on what consumers want to do regarding your business and there's a wider point that high levels of poverty and high levels of inequality can lead to a detrimental environment for business where there can be high levels of social and economic unrest. I think I'll hand over to Marina who's going to give us some more detailed information about the corporate commitments so let me wait just say thank you Marina. Perfect thank you very much Anna yeah so we now want to talk a little bit more to you about these corporate commitments that we've been researching for the past few months and of course as Anna said earlier they're clearly motivated by those effects that Lopez has on business but of course also on the workers so here on this slide you can see just some not all of the corporate commitments made to living wages both in supply chains and just in direct operations and the sort of timelines of these commitments may vary so for example we have here Unilever and L'Oreal which have committed to living wages by 2030 as well we have Tesco which have started paying living wages to their banana suppliers from January 2022 so they have not yet committed to all supply chains but just certain ones which they can act upon at the moment and all of these different companies they are all on sort of different journeys towards living wages and this is something that we found very often discussed in our in our interviews with companies they were often saying that of course living wages are not something that can be implemented overnight and it really is something that takes time so just for example Patagonia in in 2019 they had 35% of their apparel assembly factories paying workers a living wage on average and looking at the companies that have not yet completely committed to living wages in their entire supply chains we have for example Heineken which are committing to paying fair wages to their direct employees by 2023 as well as their third party employees on site by 2030 and of course them and Natura and Co as well as other multinationals are working towards implementing living wages in their supply chains once they take care of sort of their own operations first which can be done a bit more quickly but on this note we also wanted to kind of focus in on one of the companies that we spoke to during our research and we found their journey very interesting and this is Fairphone which is a depth social enterprise building a market for ethical phones and some of you may already own their phones if you are very much interested in sort of ethical products but what they did is they decided to pay a living wage bonus to all of the workers at their the factory producing their phones in China and how they started doing this is by first reviewing their living wage estimates from the Global Living Wage Coalition and the Asia floor wage so that provided them with one estimate of what's the or a couple estimates of what the living wage should be but in addition to that what they did and what is really important that they did is they consulted workers through a survey and dialogue to find out what they really needed in order to have a decent standard of living and so after all of this they they calculated how much they would need to pay in order to achieve this wage on their production line and they determined that actually was only a fixed bonus of 1.50 euro per phone that would be able to close the living wage gap between the calculated living wage and the Chinese minimum wage and then they incorporated this into the product price and this led to an increase of 0.33 percent per phone however the challenge that of course they encountered is that Fairphone is only one company only one buyer among many from that same factory and so this meant that actually the impact of their living wage contribution is blunted unless other buyers also factor in living wage contributions and in order to kind of solve this issue what they decided to do was first consult the workers on what they thought should be done and how to best distribute the bonus and through this consultation they found that the workers agreed that it was best to actually share the living wage bonus which was meant initially just for Fairphone workers but they wanted to actually share that among all of the workers in the factory and there are certain benefits to this they they say that this better accommodates for any changes in the workforce or the production line and we were told in our interviews as well that it helps to avoid any sort of unwanted conflict or competition or favoritism within the factory so what happens now is that Fairphone and and other workers at the factory they receive this bonus on top of their salary each month and then each year the size of the bonus is re-evaluated in order to integrate new information and any changes in living costs year to year so that was a really interesting kind of perspective that we found just from one of the companies that we spoke to but also through speaking to corporates we were actually told that the financial sector actually plays a really important role in in kind of advancing or encouraging corporates to commit to living wages and so then we also conducted a number of interviews with members of the financial community so we spoke to asset managers asset owners and we did find in fact that they are a really important stakeholder in all of this who have a lot of potential for to drive positive change so just by thinking a bit about sort of what responsible investment can do with regard to living wages firstly investors can consider living wages when building their portfolios so they can incorporate living wages into their into their investment decisions either through integrating living wages in their investment analysis and decisions or through screening in order to include or exclude certain companies based on either their living wage policies or their wage levels as well they can possibly choose to invest in companies that aim to create meaningful jobs in emerging economies and not only as well as providing living wages throughout their supply chains but most often what we found by speaking to asset managers is that the way that they choose to kind of do something about living wages is that they try to improve decent work in living wage practices outcomes and disclosure through their stewardship so most often they will engage with their investing companies and try to find ways in which they can improve these practices and in addition they can also submit or vote on shareholder resolutions in order to influence outcomes and we see a lot more of this being done recently so for example you can see here in the slide in this past month actually in March the IDH which is the Sustainable Trade Initiative which started in the Netherlands and it brings together over 600 companies and governments to drive new sustainable production and trade models they hosted a webinar and what happened is that as part of this a group of 45 investors from around the globe with 6.3 trillion euro of assets under management they actually issued an endorsement of IDH's living income and living wage roadmaps so they issued a statement coordinated by Sustainalytics and their endorsement actually calls on companies to develop a roadmap on living income and living wages so you can see all of these investors here and others because these are not all the 45 ones but all of these investors are in support of companies being a lot more involved and committing to living wages and living income which is really positive change in addition there are other important actors in this space so we have share action which is a responsible investment charity here in the UK also acting a bit in Europe and they work on on several good work themes which include living wages specifically also this Monday actually they filed a special resolution for consideration at the AGM of a large UK supermarket retailer regarding living wage accreditation and they coordinated an investor coalition managing 2.2 trillion pounds for this which was really notable because it was actually the first shareholder resolution calling for a listed firm to become a living wage accredited employer and this is specifically important for supermarkets because no supermarkets in the UK have yet to be accredited as living wage employers so hopefully this should lead to some to some positive change and clearly investors are in support of these of these resolutions share action also have a good work coalition which brings together a number of investors that want to improve decent work practices and they have the workforce disclosure initiative which basically encourages companies to better disclose on workforce related matters including including wages and living wages and lastly here on the slide we have the platform living wage financials which was launched in 2018 and it was the first investor coalition on living wages and they are an alliance of 19 financial institutions with over 4.8 trillion euro of assets under management mostly Dutch but also expanding into Europe and they encourage and monitor investing companies to address the non-payment of living wages in global supply chains and platform living wage financials actually takes us to this short case study that we have on Robico which is an asset management firm from the Netherlands very much focused on on sustainable finance and they worked with platform living wage financials in their engagement which started in 2019 on the payment of living wages in the global supply chain of apparel of the apparel industry and they engaged with nine companies in the industry in this process ranging from fast-passion retailers to luxury brands and they focused on three things in their engagement they focused on how companies uphold the payment of living wages across their strategy on how this is supported by responsible purchasing practices and meaningful industry collaborations and also whether they offered remedies when incidents related to wages were identified so they ran this engagement program for three years and they reported seeing positive progress and they successfully closed half about half of their cases and in their active ownership reports at the end of last year they also recognize a challenge in terms of corporate disclosure which is something that we also encountered a lot sort of we were told in our in our interviews that we conducted so not only because of course there is limited disclosure at the moment on wages and especially living wages from corporations but also for brands that participate in for example multi-stakeholder initiatives promoting decent work they actually don't often disclose sort of the outcomes of those engagement of those of their involvement in multi-stakeholder initiatives so there's still some progress to be made but clearly as we can see from the involvement of the entire financial sector and from this example from Robico there is positive progress in this space I will now pass back to Ana. Thanks so much Marina so just to just to finish up we wanted to kind of do two things the first one is to think about the wider context in which living wages should be paid and the reason we're doing this is because as Marina mentioned we've done 31 interviews to try and understand what businesses are doing and what investors are doing and how we're moving towards living wages and one thing that was repeatedly emphasized to us as we were asking is that living wages are much more meaningful when they're paid in a wider context of decent work so living wages they've become very very appealing very easy to understand idea that you pay people the right amount of what they need to live on and it's amazing that companies are moving in this direction and this is really gaining momentum I think if we step back and we think about well what what would work look like with living wages but no other standards of decent work we'd realize that it still would be very problematic so instead we're saying you know living wages are absolutely a kind of core pillar of what decent work means but there's other parts of decent work as well which absolutely have to be upheld including issues like safe work ensuring social protection making sure that workers have legal rights so they have voice and recognition in their roles at work and that they have access to wider things such as education and training infrastructure and services so this is just it's not to detract from the discussion of living wages at all but to say that living wages are like fundamental to this but don't stop there please I think is the overall message and then moving on to the challenges there's some challenges which Maroon has already alluded to maybe next slide this Maroon's already alluded to with a discussion about Fairphone and how they've navigated some of the issues along the way so other things that have come up have been in terms of calculating and measuring living wages this isn't rocket science it's not really difficult it's just a case there's lots of different ways that you can measure it so people who are embarking on that living wage journey need to work out there's a bit of thinking that needs to happen before you can say we are paying living wages because some some research has got to be done some calculations to work out what the living wage rates would be in the in the countries where or the cities where where someone's working I think what's also particularly interesting regarding this is that I think the people who or the companies that are trailblazing now are possibly the ones who've got to do more thinking around this whereas as this becomes more and more normal and more and more established there will be better records regarding what the living wage is in certain locations and it will be much quicker to know what that living wage is and then to implement it I think one thing we learned particularly from Fairphone was the importance of engaging with workers that we saw this challenge faced in terms of you know how do you pay a living wage premium to only a handful of workers within a larger factory meeting lots of different orders from many different companies many of which aren't paying living wages and engaging workers in that case clearly was a very good way of making sure that what by trying to do a good thing you didn't accidentally do a bad thing by increasing competition or creating disputes within the factory context so that was a really really nice kind of example of how that worked well gender is a really interesting one and a couple of our interviewees really highlighted to us that actually there's this implicit assumption that that living wages will be good for women or that it will be good at kind of narrowing that gender pay gap of course increasing someone's wage from being quite low to a bit higher is beneficial the problem comes in when quite a lot of living wage calculations work on the assumption of a more or less full-time working week and what we know about women's work is that women work much much more than a full-time working week but some of that work is unpaid care and domestic work in addition to paid work and because they've got so many hours of work sometimes their paid work gets squeezed to a shorter number of hours which means that by the end of the work they're the working week or the paid working week what they've earned doesn't always amount to what they need to live on that week so it's just a flag to say you know when we when we do make these calculations it's really important to make them gender sensitive and bring in that awareness and that knowledge that we have about the different work patterns that men and women have another thing that we just um worn about is like quite often living wages are framed as a solution to poverty and inequality and they absolutely are a very good way of addressing poverty especially working poverty they're a good way of starting to address inequality but I wouldn't oversell them to say that they're enough to address inequality as a whole because of course inequality is to do the whole spectrum of earnings and wealth it's not just to do with the people at the bottom end so it's good to be important to kind of make sure we have other solutions to inequality alongside that and then there's I think the last thing is just in terms of making sure that work has received the money that they are due to be paid again like a procedural thing shouldn't be too difficult but it's just making sure that it really happens perhaps we could go on to the last slide Marina so Marina and I have produced a few outputs from this project we're really excited that this report The Cases for Living Wages is about to be launched in May 2022 and it's going to be launched in or around the rescheduled Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum and so like do look out on CSL social media channels because we'll be making some noise about it at the time we're also preparing academic paper and if you're interested we did run a webinar during Living Wage Week about investment and decent work in living wages with CSL's sustainable finance group so that may also be of interest to you I think Becca's going to pop a link in the chat for that right now in case you want to follow up and then we also just wanted to point to anyone who is interested in this who wants some more information to some useful resources that we've found there's a huge wealth of different organizations working on this so if you're a tall inspired or if you've already started this journey and you want some support we'd really recommend in particular these three but there's many others as well who are already out there doing the hard work trying to figure out how to make this work and also offering advice to people just getting started I think that just leaves me to say thank you thank you for listening I hope you found us interesting and we really look forward to to your questions thank you very much Hannah and Marina that was great I covered a lot of ground we do have a little bit of time for questions just to sort of just to sort of acknowledge that you did mention this and I think it's very very important that this is a global challenge this could relate to a company based in western Europe with a supply chain into Asia or some other part of the world it could equally apply to a company headquartered in Asia with with a supply chain back into the UK or back into another comparable country this is a global issue and I think we have questions in the area of how does one determine living wage in these different political and cultural and economic contexts you've mentioned organizations like the global global living wage coalition and of course in the UK we have the living wage foundation it does feel to me from what you're saying that you know given especially given the poll that we have multiple definitions whether it's minimum or fair or living and of course major major differences in different parts of the world how should companies begin to fathom what a living wage actually is with some degree of confidence before they embark on establishing levels and hopefully doing something about their pay. That's a great question maybe I'll kick off and then Marina can follow up with some more details. We've only got time for brief answers I'm afraid Hannah. Oh okay we'll be quick then so there's various different methodologies and the anchor methodology is a really well respected methodology and where they really go into a country and do a lot of detailed research. Another thing that is probably really worthwhile doing is engaging with unions who are very interested in pay as well and will have a lot to say on that topic and the consults like if there's a national norm for the country or living in like like Jade mentioned for the UK with the wage foundation they've already done the hard work for you so you can you can adopt that so there's there's different approaches but there's lots of methodologies out there and sometimes it's already been calculated and I honestly think that the more companies that are doing this there'll be a critical mass of information and knowledge and then there'll be it'll be much the more that it gets involved the easier it's going to be so it should ease up in the coming years I'm sure. But it's fair to say isn't it because we have a question around whether governments and policy makers should be taking the initiative here versus more voluntary efforts by companies which are more along the lines that you've you've given us in the case studies that does seem to it's not attention so much but it seems to be a kind of a bit of a missed opportunity. How do you see progress here I mean we've waited a hundred years and we still have a sort of decent level of living wage commitments or practice globally is this really something that needs to be dealt with through regulation or do you see these voluntary efforts and the kind of growing consensus that that this is good for business as well as good for society being sufficient to drive action at the speed which we require. Marina do you want to take that on us today? I can start and then you can add a few events a little bit I think I just have one point we often heard in our interviews from companies and other actors that regulation should play a pretty big part however also when speaking for example to the ILO what we heard is that you know governments do have a pretty difficult job in kind of trying to in a way balance the the sort of asks of workers and also businesses and oftentimes they do ask for kind of opposite sides so often workers will ask for higher wage as well as businesses will try to keep their costs lower and so governments need to sort of balance that and that is why you know they often have minimum wages as opposed to living wages but then often the companies that are pioneers in the field and that wants those higher wages in order to make sure that their workers have a decent standard of living they are asking as well for governments to take that into consideration and they are asking for support and so I think that's in the countries where you know for example such as in the UK where government does support to some extent businesses to to make this change then that is where living wage will advance most quickly and so in my opinion yes governments do have a role to play but it is quite difficult for them and we have to sort of acknowledge that I don't know if you have anything else Anna? Yeah that's great thank you I think I just like thank you Maria I just add that the dream is that the living the minimum wage gets raised up to living wage levels and then and then extended to people to include all workers you know that would be a very a very good way of doing things maybe it's interesting just to note that actually the Nordic countries quite a few of them don't have minimum wages and it's all all their wages are set through negotiation between employers and unions so and you know for them there isn't a low wage problem particularly some of the most equal countries in the world so it's not like minimum wages are the only route to this but I think the issue is just you know how do we get there as quickly as possible and at present minimum wages aren't catching up with living wages quickly enough and this is why there's such a kind of golden opportunity for businesses to really lead the way actually and start taking some of the bold steps which really need to happen because we can see that the cost of not paying living wages is so high in terms of human cost but also in the business cost as well we would do a great job of moving quickly towards many of the sustainable development goals if we could figure this out because it's really holding so many people back. Thanks both that is exciting then to to acknowledge the you know the really substantive opportunity for business to shape the the low pay living wage debate obviously in partnership with other stakeholders such as unions and government but you're you're you've definitely created a space there where you've said this would make a difference and I think that obviously extends to the investors in those companies as well and an investment generally to make sure that you know capital is driving the change process as much as individual business action so thank you for that. I think that the next question surrounds is sort of coming up in different forms and that is where does where does the living wage discussion how is it situated within the broader discussion about you know good jobs or decent work as it sometimes referred to so even within the pay space you know we have a we have a debate about living wage but we also have one about executive pay we also have one about the stratification of pay the highest earners versus the lowest earners in a company or the genie coefficient sometimes used in measurement so there's there's a there's a range of issues around pay living wage is among them but then within the decent workspace we also have things like you know working conditions discrimination at work contract types. How important is this living wage discussion do you think in the the overall social sustainability sphere is it is it one of those kind of leverage points that if we get this right lots of other things come into focus or is it just one of a dozens of issues around this all of which need to be tackled with the same kind of force. Interesting question I'd like to think it is a leverage point actually because like we there's a great sociologist called Goran Thurbon who talks about different types of inequality one is existential inequality so life expectancy which is such a striking measure of inequality because you see some people actually just don't even get to live as long as others and this is really geographically patterns as well. Another type is material inequality so that's your financial and other resources so that's where wages fit in and then the last one is in terms of respect so and we see that they line up so I think when you pay people better often that comes with high levels of respect as well and when you've got high levels of respect maybe you're treated better in the workplace so you know it's it doesn't one doesn't guarantee the other but I would have a strong expectation that when you start treating people better which starts with thinking what does this person need to live on and am I exploiting them by not paying them enough when you start when you when you start changing your way of thinking and thinking about what workers need and living wage is a great place to start with that hopefully that new way of conceptualizing the workers and relating to your workers hopefully has kind of leads to other effects and you do see that some of the worst human rights abuses in the workplace often line up with very low pay so I would think it is a leverage point but you know it's we're quite early in that journey as well so it remains to be seeing what will happen but given given what we've seen elsewhere I think it is a pivotal point. Yes we're sort of a dilemma as we're early in the journey even though it's been a hundred years so far thinking about it it's just incredible. The last question I think we've got we've got time for and this one concerns is living wage a really an issue for larger companies that have the flexibility to think about all of the issues and the business cases behind why they might benefit from adopting living wages versus let's say a small even a micro-sized company that may not feel that it that it has that sufficient financial muscle to invest in that way and you know how do we sort of begin to develop arguments which might suit both the large and the small or the the ones with the flexibility versus the ones who may be you know just establishing themselves and not feel that they're quite there yet. Is this a big organization agenda only? I don't think so I don't think so at all I think it's for everyone but Marina do you want to come in on this? I will just note that we did speak to a small company actually locally in Cambridge in our research as well and I think they actually gave us the most straightforward answer in terms of whether there's a business case or not or how they adopted or their motivation and they just said we just knew we had to do it and we did it and it was quite easy once we knew what the living wage rate was and we just paid everyone a living wage rate and that was it and that was because they don't have you know very complex supply chains they don't the company that we spoke to we they don't have many other contractors or anything they don't have many employees and so they they had to make the finances work but once they knew that they had to do that and in order to become a living wage accredited employer to them it was very straightforward and very easy and then they just adjusted everything else based on that so that they actually provided us with the most simple and straightforward story as opposed to larger companies who did kind of bring or explain a lot of a lot of challenges that they had due to their size. So yeah that's just one one little story from our research. One data point thank you very much Marina. I think I'd like to wrap up now but before I do just to acknowledge that we have several links relating to the topic area in the chat which could provide useful resources for those of you who've participated and also to to invite you again to to take a look at Marina and Anna's report when it's published I think in May at Davos which really is a great summary of some of the issues which we've been covering. Marina just touched on Cambridge a Cambridge company here I sometimes think that you know possibly Cambridge needs a waiting system as well as major major cities like London because actually the cost of living in here and in many parts of the world is just sort of the it's just becoming very much more complicated for people in the current context and I wonder whether those figures which we saw during the poll might quite you know increase quite radically over the next few years as a to accommodate the inflation energy price rises and lots of instabilities and volatilities in the economy right right around the world. So clearly this is a this is a this is a moving debate which is sometimes why it's I think quite hard for companies to to plan ahead and understand quite what the implications are but certainly certainly that was food for thought so I'd like to thank you Anna and Marina for the presentation really glad you've been able to do that I'd like to thank Unilever for the for its generous support of the of the fellowship program and of course thank you all for participating today it's great to have you as part of these as part of this series great to have your questions and although we conclude this round of four webinars based around our research program we are very likely to do more in future and I hope you can participate in some oral of those and lastly I'd like to thank two people who haven't been thanked sufficiently during the process and that's that's Rebecca and Gianna who have been masterminding the this webinar series that done an enormous round of work behind the scenes to get them into this shape so thanks very much for all your efforts on that and I'll say goodbye and thank you once again for your participation thank you goodbye thank you