We take great pride in paying our artisanal team wages that are well above those of white collar workers – both because we want them to be able to live comfortably and because we want to honour their amazing skill. Without this commitment, we would not be worthy of our name. 

 

Our wage setting relies upon time motion studies conducted in accordance with the methodology developed by Nest, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization supporting the responsible growth and creative engagement of the artisan & maker economy. In this, we have calculated the piece rates needed to provide our artisans with a living wage in accordance with the benchmark set by the Global Living Wage Coalition. This translates to paying at least 3-4 times the local market standard.

 

It is important for us at Pura Utz to emphasise that our approach to piece rate work is in no way a means to pressure artisans towards excessive workloads or overtime; rather, it is founded in our wish to ensure that artisans are sufficiently compensated for their work and have the freedom and ability to take on work according to their cultural context, including having the opportunity to work from home due to household responsibility and thereby not excluding them from their independent income because of this.

 

We furthermore enter into formalised contracts with our artisanal team, which is quite state of the art for the type of work they do. 

 

For more information on how we have developed our methodology and how we provide for our team, feel free to take a deep dive into the impact report we have finalised this year.