Our goals are simple: reduce our environmental footprint, treat people with respect, and build products you can trust to perform – at a fair price for all. As we endeavor to continue providing high-quality products that enable everyone to lead active outdoor lifestyles, we take seriously our responsibility to ensure a ‘fair price for all’ in our global supply chain. This goes beyond the till and speaks to our belief at Mountain Equipment Company that workers have a right to fair compensation – and we're committing to action this belief.
What is fair compensation?
Simply put, fair compensation enables every worker to earn enough weekly wages without overtime: allowing workers to support themselves, at least two family members, and save for the future.
The requirement for fair compensation is embedded within the Fair Labor Association’s Workplace Code of Conduct and the MEC Supplier Code of Conduct. It is also generally recognized as a human right by the United Nations.
What has Mountain Equipment Company done to support fair compensation in our supply chain?
We work with our suppliers to ensure that all workers’ compensation and benefits meet the legal minimum wage or the appropriate prevailing wage, whichever is higher. In addition to this, we support the freedom of association for all workers in our supply chain, including the formation of collective bargaining agreements. We also work with Fair Trade Certified as an avenue to support fair compensation for workers, as MEC pays a premium to workers in these factories that can fund projects determined by workers to address their collective and individual needs.
As a part of our responsible purchasing practices, we are taking new steps by developing our Fair Compensation Strategy.
To inform our strategy development, we are utilizing the FLA’s Fair Compensation Dashboard and Wage Data Collection Tools to measure and track our progress against wage benchmarks. These scalable tools measure progress towards fair wages for workers and, where available, rely on Anker methodology. This methodology means that worker voice is incorporated into the calculation of these estimates, and the breadth of its use allows for benchmarking across regions.
Our progress
Since we began this journey, we’ve worked with partners ranging from Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines and more. Our main effort has been to create a fair compensation baseline for our supply chain that can inform our strategy going forward.
We are working with the FLA and industry groups to address some of the key challenges we’ve found in this work, like the complicated data collection process, limited benchmarks using Anker methodology (though this is getting better!), and accounting for an evolving supply chain.
Our fair compensation work will continue to evolve, so we’re maintaining an adaptive approach. We will continue collecting and analyzing wage data from our factories, assessing our purchasing practices, and collaborating with industry partners.
We’ll report on our progress in our annual sustainability report as part of our commitment to transparency.
