Fairtrade is about paying producers fair prices, but it is often about so much more. It is a strategy for lifting people up, out of poverty, hopelessness, and sometimes slavery. One of the organizations “on the ground” helping people in Southeast Asia is Hagar. Hagar Design Limited describes itself as follows:
Hagar Design Limited “Producing quality home fashion and women's accessories and providing employment for disadvantaged women and men.”
Hagar Design products are sold through retail channels in America, Europe and Asia-Pacific as well as in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. Every Hagar Design product is specially crafted to enrich personal lifestyle, as well as the lives of its skilled artisans. Each purchase further empowers Cambodian women and children in their quest for a meaningful future.
Hagar Design provides employment to women and men who have gone through Hagar’s prevention and rehabilitation programs.
In 2004 Hagar Design was awarded the G-Mark Good Design Award by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization (JIDPO).
For a more personal account, and to learn more about the women who are being helped by Hagar, read the following account by a representative of one of my wholesalers, World of Good, when she visited Hagar’s facilities in Cambodia.
Hagar, RCC and NCDP in Cambodia
September 14, 2006 at 1:11 pm · Filed under Cambodia, Holly
I just finished a great day in Cambodia meeting with Hagar, National Center for Disabled People (NCDP), and Rehab Craft Cambodia (RCC). The Wage Guide was very well received and the groups here are doing incredible work in Fair Trade. Cambodia is still recovering from a terrible civil war and there are still many lasting signs of the war, but the people here have a magical happy quality about them. It is truly inspirational.
As a result of the war-torn past, many of the producer groups in Cambodia are not your typical artisan group working out of their homes and in their villages. The majority of producers work in fair trade weaving and production centers that employ people who have suffered emotionally and/or physically from the long, dark period of the brutal civil war.
I started my day by visiting with Hagar, an amazing organization. They work with recovery and rehabilitation of victims of human trafficking (both sex slavery and labor slavery). They make an enormous investment in these individuals with the key goal being to help them get their feet back on the ground. They provide psychological counseling and medical treatment as well as creating economic opportunities for the individuals. They pay high daily wages and did not really need the Wage Guide to show them that, but they were very supportive of our work both on the nonprofit and business side. I was truly inspired by the dedication and commitment of Hagar to help the victims of human trafficking.
On my next visit, I met with Craft Network Cambodia (an IFC assistance group)and NCDP. NCDP was a perfect fit for the wage guide because all their production work is done per piece. I presented the Wage Guide to their team and we tested the two products that World of Good has purchased from them. They were excited about the guide and saw a good application of the tool. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that using the wage guide needs to become a standard practice of fair trade in order to motivate producers to use the Wage Guide. Or buyers (like world of good) need to require it as part of their product sourcing check list. The reason for this is that it is an extra cost and the producers are already spread quite thin. It is not worth their investment unless there is a clear outcome or benefit (i.e. the buyer requires it or fair trade requires it). Until then, we are going to need to focus on working with the global fair trade community (esp. Fair Trade Buyers in the north) encouraging people to adopt and use the wage guide as part of their product sourcing.
RCC was my final stop for the day. They were a wonderful group and very happy to see World of Good. RCC pays their artisans a monthly salary and the leader of their organization was very interested to see how their salary measured up to the Wage Guide. I am starting to realize that the Wage Guide is most useful and important to groups that pay per piece. It is important as a spot check tool for the groups that pay daily, weekly, monthly salaries, but they only really need to measure it periodically against the wage indicators.
Generally, the salaried artisans are better off than the per piece workers because they have more consistent work. Audrey and I really need to focus on reaching out to groups who work with “per piece” payment.
During the past week, I have had many stimulating discussions about fair trade with a variety of people from all facets of fair trade.
The state of fair trade (and especially fair wages) is a complicated issue, but it is an important discussion for the movement. I believe we are bringing a very positive voice to the movement to try to stimulate discussions around Fair Wages and how they fit in with the overall movement. The answers are still out there, but I feel we are definitely raising a lot of questions and there are many smart, caring, wonderful people who are thoughtfully responding to our work and helping us to come up with solutions.
One last quick note, I had a great meeting with a member of the ILO office in Bangkok and she has invited me to present the Wage Guide to a group at the ILO. I am looking forward to this opportunity and hope that we can partner to improve the research and data driving the wage guide. (http://www.worldofgood.org/blog/?p=66)
