Why Good Wages Should Matter To All Investors

Some change is slow. Living wage, defined as sufficient to afford a decent standard of living for the worker and his or her family in a particular place, has a storied intellectual history. Plato and Aristotle wrote about the concept of a living wage without defining it, medieval theological Thomas Aquinas called for just wages, Adam Smith and Henry Ford alike recognized the value of rising real wages, and the miner’s wife pictured above was campaigning for a living wage in 1972.

The time has now come for all investors to take a closer look at living wages. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a coalition of faith-based and values-based investors, last week released a statement calling on US companies to pay a living wage to their workers. 136 institutional investors with US $4.5 trillion in assets, including Nomura Asset Management and Legal & General Investment Management, signed the statement.