Employees Earning a Living Wage or Higher (OI4724)

This metric is intended to capture the number of employees earning a local living wage or higher.

According to the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) Methodology, a living wage is defined as enough to provide a decent living for a worker and their family based on a regular work week, not including overtime hours. A living wage is sufficient to cover food, water, clothing, transport, education, health care, and other essential needs for workers and their officially entitled dependents, along with some discretionary income. Workers should also receive equal pay for equal work. For more on this definition, see CHRB (https://www.corporatebenchmark.org/).

Since the living wage varies with geography, IRIS+ does not define a living wage. However, the following resources are recommended for companies with workers located in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or the United States. Organizations with workers in other geographies may reference the Global Living Wage Coalition (https://www.globallivingwage.org) to find out if a living wage benchmark is available in that geography.

• Living Wage Canada (http://livingwagecanada.ca)
• Living Wage for Ireland (https://www.livingwage.ie)
• Living Wage New Zealand (https://www.livingwage.org.nz/)
• UK: Living Wage Foundation (http://www.livingwage.org.uk/calculation)
• United States: MIT Living Wage Calculator (http://livingwage.mit.edu)

All organizations should footnote the living wage levels they have used for this metric.

This metric is multidimensional with regard to the five dimensions of impact. In some contexts, this metric can serve as an indicator of whether the outcome being sought by an investor or organization is occurring (the WHAT dimension of impact). This metric may also help describe the HOW MUCH Scale dimension, which helps estimate the number of the targeted stakeholders experiencing the outcome. For more on the alignment of IRIS metrics to the five dimensions of impact, see IRIS+ and the Five Dimensions of Impact (https://iris.thegiin.org/document/iris-and-the-five-dimensions/). No single metric is sufficient to understand an impact; rather, metrics are selected as a set across all dimensions of impact. The selection of metrics to measure and describe the five dimensions should be based on best practice and evidence.