STORY BEHIND WAGES
Global brands and their managers are making millions in profits, they’re exploiting their garment workers by paying them barely anything. It’s crucial to close the gap between legal minimum wages and a fair wage, to fund decent livings. Sadly, the lack of working practices and general excessive demand means the industry is still lagging where it needs to be. Therefore, we need to work on solutions. So we did!
WAGES AT ARMEDANGELS
We as brands don’t pay wages directly to the garment workers since we don’t own any factories. All our partners are individually owned entities. We, however, pay prices for the garments we buy from them. These prices need to be fair. We at ARMEDANGELS set a high degree of transparency and also demand this from our partners.
We’ve been extremely busy implementing our True Costing methodology over the past few years, which makes price negotiations almost obsolete and wage payment as transparent as possible. We set the goal to always pay 20% above minimum wages for all suppliers. Currently, we are evaluating actual wages of all our suppliers twice a year. Because it’s only fair if it’s fair for everyone.
Julia Kirschner
Social impact manager at Armedangels
“Every movement starts with action. Already since 2017, we work with a radical open costing for all our products to make sure that we have transparency in wages and avoid negotiating against them.
I am very proud that we joined forces with four other like-minded brands to further accelerate change. In this unique pilot project, we established the payment of a living wage bonus to all production workers in the factory, making a real difference to the livelihood of each worker.
This is another amazing project to prove that ARMEDANGELS is here to make a change and that we have fantastic supply chain partners on board to support us in our mission."
