Our Vision
Workers around the world can afford a decent life for themselves and their families.
Our Mission
Provide high quality and consistent knowledge and information about living wage levels, implementation, and impact necessary for stakeholders of all types to collaborate in a non-competitive environment toward wage increases globally.
Who We Are
The Global Living Wage Coalition (GLWC) is a unique knowledge-action partnership working to enable collaborative action to achieve a decent standard of living for working people and their families worldwide.
The GLWC is organized as a partnership between two independent networks with complementary missions and work: the Anker Living Wage and Income Research Institute (Anker Research Institute) and the GLWC Action Network (Action Network).
Researchers and research institutions participate in the Anker Research Institute with the joint mission of engaging in and disseminating high quality research, analysis, and training related to living wage and living income (based on the Anker Methodology) to inform and influence companies, empower working people, and shape public policy. The Action Network is a platform for living wage action, comprised of organisations such as non-profits, charities, government entities, etc. The networks come together through the GLWC to steer the partnership towards achievement of shared objectives and commitments.
Learn more about the Global Living Wage Coalition’s members and partners.
What We Do
The Coalition is engaged in both research and action on living wage, with the ambition of ensuring achieving a living wage for all. The GLWC sees research, practice-based learning, and collaborative action as essential ingredients for achieving this ambition.
The GLWC believes that alignment around living wage definitions and measurement, and around living wage values themselves, provides a critical foundation for informing and enabling collaborative efforts to raise worker wages. The Coalition is committed to using the Anker Methodology as the basis for producing high quality, consistent, objective information about living wages and wage gaps to support wage improvement strategies and programmes. The Coalition is also committed to supporting the further development and application of this methodology.
While the focus of the Coalition is to support living wage related research and promote living wage related action, the GLWC also supports the use of the Anker Methodology to set living income benchmarks for farmers. Thus, the Coalition encourages consistency in how the information about the cost of a basic but decent standard of living is applied to all working people and their families in a particular place.
Each living wage benchmark commissioned by the GLWC is made public to increase the opportunity for collaboration toward payment of a living wage.
Living Wage Defined
In order to work together on living wage, it is important to share an understanding of what a living wage is. A 2011 International Labour Organization (ILO) review revealed that there is a general consensus on the definition of living wage (R. Anker, Estimating a Living Wage: A Methodological Review, ILO 2011). Drawing on this report and in consultation with experts, the Global Living Wage Coalition has adopted a common definition for living wage.
For more information on the work of the Global Living Wage Coalition, contact us at glwc@globallivingwage.org.