One of the notable challenges encountered in the living wage assessment for 2023 pertains to the transparency of certain Tier 1 suppliers. Some of these suppliers have a history of providing incomplete or falsified working hours and payroll records during previous social audits. To address this issue, the Sustainability staff in the respective regions collaborated closely with these suppliers. They assisted in conducting root cause analyses of the documentation and systemic issues in the wage and working hours systems. Additionally, capacity-building efforts were undertaken, involving step-wise milestones for remediation.
Zalora had facilitated some of its Tier 1 factories to review their working hours recording and wage systems as some had critical issues in extreme working hours arrangement in 2020-2021 through the following approaches:
- Factory visit at the factory and conduct document review, workers interviews and management interviews to review the critical issues on working hours and wages.
- Assisted the factory management to analyse the root cause of the issues and develop the milestones and remediation plans for improving the extreme working hours and wage issues.
- Conduct a factory visit again after the issues were remediated and the factory was approved for ZALORA production.
- Additional comments were provided for factory’s further remediation in the factory visit report
ZALORA was working closely with all the 4 China Tier 1 factories through the above steps for improving the working hours and wages issues in the past 3 years. In the 2023 Living Wage Assessments, all workers in all 4 China Tier 1 factories were above the living wage benchmarks provided by Wageindicator.
