Living Wage & Income Lab

The Living Wage & Income Lab, formerly Living Wage Lab, is the first laboratory bringing together producers, retailers and other stakeholders in the agri-food sector to come up with innovative solutions to take effective action towards living wages for workers and living income for producers in global agri-food supply chains. 

The lab was launched in November 2015 by Fairfood and Hivos. We believe that the supply chain as a whole has a shared responsibility in ensuring that workers are paid a living wage and ensured a living income, while each separate stakeholder also has an individual responsibility to attain this goal. The Lab is a platform for co-creation and experimentation: just like in a laboratory, we test ideas and combinations to develop new solutions and prototypes to address the living wage issue. Solutions are found in new technologies, new policies, new business models, and other forms of collaboration.

A wide array of stakeholders participate in the Lab: producers, retailers, government, trade unions, NGOs, certification bodies and research institutes. The Lab provides a platform to exchange insights on best practices and lessons learned, develop tools to get started with implementing living wage, and support each other in the set up of projects to implement living wage.

Fairfood is working on a transparent, fair and sustainable food system. We do so with the help of fair tech (e.g. blockchain technology) and together with the stakeholders that are involved in the system. Our mission: only fair food on our plates. This means that it is being produced by people who live a life in dignity, that the environment was respected during the production and that everybody in the production chain profits both economically and socially. 

After 5 years of successful partnership with Hivos during the creation and development of the Living Wage & Income Lab, we took the lead on this project as part of our RECLAIM Sustainability! Programme, a 5-year strategic partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to foster inclusive and sustainable value chains.