Moving from conversation to policy
During the Living Wage & Living Income Summit hosted by IDH and UN Global Compact in Rotterdam in June, high-profile speakers from across global economies plainly set out the path forward. Three governments, moving independently, have reached the same conclusion that paying people enough to live on is now policy, and increasingly, a condition of capital.
Mr Antonio Sanguino, Minister of Labour of Colombia, explained how the country has nearly doubled its minimum wage since 2021, tied explicitly to an ILO living-wage benchmark.
Mr Ajoy Sharma, India Additional Secretary Minister of Labour and Employment, spoke on how the country has codified a national wage floor for the first time, extending protection to workers previously outside its scope.
The Netherlands, meanwhile, has taken a different kind of action: rather than legislating its own wage floor, it has pushed living wages into the architecture of EU law. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) now explicitly includes living wages and living incomes as part of what responsible business conduct requires. This change was advocated for directly by the Dutch government and fellow signatories of the Living Wage and Living Income Declaration.
"For a nation like the Netherlands, resilient and sustainable value chains are more important than ever. And value chains cannot be resilient if they are built on poverty wages and inadequate incomes."
Also during the Summit, the intersection between policy and the private sector was made concrete. The ILO's Chief Inclusive Labour Markets, Wages and Working Conditions Branch, Patrick Belser, and FAO's Division Director, David Laborde, laid out where the field stands globally and what's needed from businesses to go further. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs closed by pointing to the European Commission's Open Public Consultation* on the CSDDD as a live chance for companies to help shape how the directive's living wage provisions get implemented, before the rules lock in.
*Public consultation open until August 14, 2026
But policy alone doesn't close the wage gaps. A minimum wage benchmark or a due diligence directive cannot tell a buyer how to assess a wage gap in a fragmented supply chain, or help a supplier absorb the cost of getting there. That's the space IDH exists to bridge; on one side, translating policy and investor expectations into something companies can act on, wage gap assessments, sourcing tools, supplier support that turn a standard into a plan. On the other, taking what it learns from companies on the ground, where the guidance is missing, where smallholders can't absorb new costs, where sector-specific direction doesn't exist yet, and feeding that back into how policy and investor expectations get designed in the first place.
The takeaway from the event, and from where governments now stand, is that the argument that living wages matter is largely settled. What's left is large-scale implementation - by assessing wage gaps, responding to the CSDDD consultation, and building supplier support that makes higher standards achievable.