The International Wage Observatory (IOLW) was launched last Spring as a permanent multidisciplinary collaboration project made up of a team of researchers from The Jus Semper Global Alliance and from various academic institutions in Mexico, from 2019 onwards.

The project was born as a result of the concern of both parties to develop a research space that addresses salary conditions in the world with due diligence and academic rigor, both from a global and domestic perspective. The project assesses real wages and determines what should be a living wage for each economy and for each work activity in a globalised world. The project carries out its work on the context that, in the current globalised world, there are structures that prevent large portions of the population in the world from enjoying decent wages, due to systemic structures that have caused the share of labour in the economy to be consistently reduced in the past fifty years.

This concern has borne fruit for the creation of this project with Jus Semper, who has focused, since 2003, on the research of this problem through “The Living Wages North and South Initiative” (TLWNSI), which developed a methodology for the assessment of wage gaps and their underlying causes, particularly in the manufacturing sector; a sector of utmost importance to Mexico for its paramount economic importance. With this setting, we have every confidence on contributing to solving this problem in Mexico and in the world …….

Vision:

To envision an environment with a significant reduction in inequality in the world — replacing the economic structures that generate an unequal exchange between capital and labor and between the metropolis of the system and the peripheral countries — as part of the transition to a new transformative paradigm of true democracy and sustainability, whose sole purpose is to pursue the welfare of people and the planet and not the market.

Mission:

To create a labor remuneration research unit to investigate, analyse and assess the salary situation in Mexico and the world from the perspective of human dignity, developing the methodology that correctly defines the parameters of living wages from both global and domestic perspectives to influence the development of policies and solutions that eliminate the gaps between real wages and living wages.

The communication herein is the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the institutional position of Jus Semper.