Hershey Prioritizes Living Wage and Income To Strengthen Human Rights and Economic Resilience
Originally published in Hershey's 2023 ESG Report
Hershey believes in addressing barriers for people to earn a living wage and every household a living income.
We recognize the direct link between living wage, living income and other human rights issues. This understanding has led us to prioritize living wage and income as a central component of our human rights agenda.
We maintain the commitment outlined in our Living Wage & Income Position Statement and assess our activities using external benchmarks and research tools. This helps identify both vulnerabilities across our whole value chain and best practices for remediation.
Assessing wage and income vulnerabilities covers areas including:
- Gaps between living wage benchmarks and minimum wages
- Existing research on farmer income
- National systems and transparency on wage-setting
- Collective bargaining
In 2023, we maintained focus on Hershey operations, where we have most opportunity to create change, and in cocoa, where we see the greatest income vulnerabilities.
Hershey-owned Operations
We maintained fair pay practices in 2023, paying 100% of full-time employees a living wage, benchmarked against BSR’s living wage values. We also remained affiliate members of Living Wage For US (LW4US), using their resources to better understand benchmarks, gap assessment tools and remediation strategies.
Cocoa Supply Chain
Cocoa is the part of our supply chain with the greatest income vulnerability. We continue to contribute solutions through the Hershey Income Accelerator Program in Côte d’Ivoire and premiums paid to farmers.
Learn more in Improving Farmer Income and Livelihoods on pages 26-27.
Investing in the Landscape
While proud of the steps we have taken, we know that more progress is needed. Areas needing additional work include building the capacity of organizations, investing in data and tools, and collaborating to scale efforts within and across industries.
We continue to work with others to advance our living wage and income agenda, including:
- Co-chairing the AIM-Progress Living Wage Working Group and developing the Living Wage Playbook, a practical tool for fast-moving consumer goods companies and their suppliers to build living wages into their supply chains.
- Partnering with LW4US to develop a user-friendly tool to calculate total remuneration, helping organizations and employees better understand and advocate for a living wage.
- Serving as a founder of WageMap, a multi-stakeholder coalition with a mission to support the achievement of living wages globally by creating consistent standards and benchmarking, and advocating, across various industries.
- Providing a grant to data provider WageIndicator to make their benchmarks publicly available worldwide.
- Recognizing that our cocoa supply chain touches different origins, we continue to collaborate with the Living Income Community of Practice and financially support the development of living income benchmarks. We believe such benchmarking is a pragmatic way to determine location-appropriate living income levels. We use benchmarks to design programs for farming households’ economic resilience.
Hershey will continue to participate in dialogues and initiatives that promote a world where opportunity exists for everyone to earn a living wage and every household to secure a living income.
What’s Next in Human Rights
- Continue to refine our salient issues, due diligence and programming
- Continue to deepen our understanding of the intersection of human rights and environmental issues, including natural resource management, climate change and deforestation
- Continue our strong programming on child labor, responsible recruitment practices, living wage and living income
What Are Living Wage and Living Income? Living wage and living income are different but related concepts we address in distinct ways.
Living Wage1: The remuneration received for a standard work week by a worker in a particular place sufficient to afford a decent standard of living for the worker and their family; applies to hired workers in factories, on farms, etc.
Living Income2: The net annual income required for a household in a particular place to afford a decent standard of living for all members of that household; applies to any income earner, such as self-employed farmers.
For more, see our Living Wage & Income Position Statement.
Thinking Wider
We act on other global challenges that threaten human rights.
- Systemic racism is a human rights issue, at its core. We have long been committed to inclusivity and we are accelerating work toward being more inclusive. For additional information, see Accelerating Togetherness Efforts on page 89.
- Climate change is a major global threat to human rights. It disrupts food supplies and threatens livelihoods. Vulnerable communities will be disproportionately impacted by rising temperatures and the related safety and water scarcity risks.
Many communities in our supply chain will be impacted if, collectively, we do not take bold action to combat climate change. Hershey is therefore committed to doing our part - see our climate commitments on pages 66-68.
1 Hershey supports the Global Living Wage Coalition’s definition of a living wage.
2 Hershey is a member of and supports the Living Income Community of Practice definition of living income.
