How can we get fair pay in workers’ pockets, and replace poverty wages with a real living wage? What new tools can our campaigns use?

In this episode:

• Reflections on how low wages help trap workers as much as bonded labour (Tola Mouen, CENTRAL, Cambodia) 
• A research project starts gathering wage slip data across several countries, in a step to hold brands accountable for the pay their workers receive (Anne Bienias, CCCIO; Martua Raja Siregar, Garteks, Indonesia) 
• The EU Directive on Minimum Wages falls well short of what’s needed, but still provides campaign and negotiation opportunities (Štefica, Garment Worker; Mario Iveković, Novi Sindikat; Nikola Ptić, Regional Industrial Trade Union, Croatia) 
• Activists in European production countries learn from the experience in Asia, as they define what a living wage should be across borders (Bojana Tamindzija, CCC Serbia, Artemisa Ljarja, CCC Germany) 
• Thoughts on how a living wage is essential to tackling globalisation (Ashim Roy, Mill Mazdoor Panchayat & AFWA, India)

Please tell us what inspired you about this show, and share your feedback, comments and questions, by emailing: podcast@cleanclothes.org 

 
If you want to know more about the Europe Floor Wage, including its methodology, you can find that here, and in even more detail here.

Speakers:

• Anne Bienias, Clean Clothes Campaign International Office, Amsterdam
• Martua Raja Siregar, Garteks Trade Union, Indonesia
• Štefica, Garment Worker, Croatia 
• Mario Iveković, President, Novi Sindikat Trade Union, Croatia 
• Nikola Ptić, Regional Industrial Trade Union, Croatia
• Bojana Tamindzija, Clean Clothes Campaign, Serbia
• Artemisa Ljarlja, Clean Clothes Campaign, Urgent Appeals Coordinator, Germany
• Ashim Roy, Asia Floor Wage Alliance International Secretariat, India

Host: Febriana Firdaus (febrianafirdaus.com)
Field Reporters: Petra Ivsic and Aca Vragolovic

Sound Engineering Support: Steve Adam (www.spectrosonics.com.au) 
Producer: Matthew Abud 
Clean Clothes Podcast Team: Anne Dekker, Johnson Ching-Yin Yeung, Liz Parker, Tanne de Goei

Full Transcript

TOLA:

Even the law, even the convention of ILO, mention that people working 8 hours per day and they should, they should be entitled to the decent living standard with human dignity. We talk with the workers, no single worker work, in our experience work only 8 hour per day and then enjoy with the decent living standard. Visibly we see that they have to force themselves to work overtime. Even you are not well enough, you are sick. And then if you just complain, you just make the complaint, they may frame up you with any criminal cases in the courts. So this is happening. So wage for me, as I said, it’s a key issue that put the people into the modern-day slavery. Forced labour. They don’t lock you by the key but they lock you by the system. 

HOST:

That’s Tola Moeun, founder of the worker rights NGO CENTRAL in Cambodia.

Today we’re talking about workers’ pay. 

How to use data to make the reality of poverty wages transparent. 

And ways to campaign for a living wage.

TOLA:

The supplier always say we cannot pay higher living wage or minimum wage because the brand just pay them low price, but we don’t know how much the brand paid to the supplier because the business agreement between the brand and the supplier is quite confidential, so it is not transparent enough and then the brand does not disclose, even some brand do not disclose their supply list so we don’t know, and then the brand make an excuse saying ok they do not have much leverage to pressure their supplier because they have a small percentage of order either from the country or either from the individual factory. 

The business agreement between the brand and the supplier, should be transparent. We know that some information they should hide, but I think the export country should also consider about the ethical information act, so the brand will not be free in terms of providing a fake information to the consumers or to its own government in terms of the situations of the workers where they’re producing the clothes. I know that in Norway for example they had introduced already the ethical information act, which hold their business or private sector be accountable in providing the accurate or real information to consumers, transparency in terms of throughout the supply chains. 

HOST:

Welcome to the show. I’m Febriana Firdaus.

Making supply chains more transparent, is a key campaign tool.

The fashionchecker.org website, is a step towards this. 

It matches brands with their supplier factories, so consumers and campaigners, can see where clothes are made. 

But this does not show factory conditions, including how much suppliers pay their workers 

To try and change this, a recent Fashion Checker project began collecting worker wage slips in several countries. 

Anne Bienias is from the Clean Clothes Campaign’s International Office.

ANNE:

We can’t just go out and campaign and ask for brands to pay something because they will always say they’re already doing that, or that it’s not as bad as we’re saying. So we need real data, we need real evidence to show that we are right and that workers have the right to earn more. So it might seem like just a small part, but it’s very important for our credibility also as a Network that our campaigns are fact-based or data-based. 

HOST:

Martua Raja Siregar is from the Garteks trade union in Indonesia. 

His union was part of the research. 

He says getting wage slips from workers can be difficult. 

RAJA:

For in the field, it’s some of the workers is afraid that their name will leak to the company, and some workers also afraid that the name of the company will be give to the brands and they scared that the brands say that this company is not good and then they stop the orders, it will be also impact to the workers. It’s also difficult for us actually to expose the name of the workers and also expose the name of the company directly if we put it in public.

ANNE:

We told the workers we would not publish the name of the factory. But it’s then impossible to make the connection to the brand, and that’s ultimately what you want to do, because you want to hold the brand accountable for the poverty wage that they’re paying. It might be that we do eventually publish the name of the factory if we know that that worker is no longer working in that factory for example, because it’s usually workers that we know. But yes, it’s very tricky and the last thing we want to do as a campaign is of course to put workers at risk. 

HOST:

The research gathered data in several countries.