Our goal for 2022 is to have 100% of our team meet or exceed living wage. We normally process our annual increases in April each year, which happened to be during the end of the pandemic cause vi COVID-19. We decided to push out merit increases for the entire company, so we aren’t at 100% living wage as we expected. While providing a living wage is still a core value, given the state of retail and our business, we quickly realized our number one priority was protecting as many jobs for as long as possible. Processing an increase would actually hurt our ability to do that. That said, we want to share exactly where we are now compared to where we want to be.
of all our workers meet living wage based on their location
is UO’s current lowest hourly wage
is LA County’s hourly living wage
All employees are informed and updated on all Corporate Responsibility related activities in a frequent manner. All new staff is offered a mandatory 2h-training on all related sustainability aspects when starting at Urban Outfitters. Special training sessions are developed for different departments (e.g. design/product; sales; marketing) with regard to sustainability, as we realized that the different departments have different scopes and must be individually trained and equipped with tailored sustainability aspects to deliver our common mission to the different stakeholders. E.g. the design/product department and sales staff is trained regularly every three months. For 2020 we have planned to install digital trainings to safeguard the ongoing capacity building.
During our quarterly meetings in our headquarters employees are additionally updated on upcoming projects about ethical practices and the Urban Outfitters Corporate Responsibility Strategy and respective targets and achievements.
The bi-monthly internal newsletter called Changemaker-News with information on global sustainability issues, trends and topics was replaced by a digital and interactive channel within our Microsoft TEAMS activities.
All staff who travels frequently to the production facilities is trained in the usage of the FWF questionnaire for Non-CSR staff. Every staff member who travels at site completes the questionnaire when visiting the factories. The questionnaires are gathered, checked on completeness, evaluated and monitored by the Corporate Responsibility manager. In 2021 a training on Occupational Health & Safety for all frequent traveling staff was conducted - so everybody checks safety conditions with eagle-eyes when visiting our partners.
Furthermore, the internal UO sustainability glossary, which serves as a guideline internally, is updated regularly with additional information and updates on materials and sustainability issues in the textile industry in general.
