Employees Earning Lowest Wage (OI8296)

This metric is intended to measure the number of employees earning the lowest hourly wage paid by the organization during the reporting period. For example, if the organization's lowest wage paid (including bonuses, excluding benefits) is USD 15 per hour and the organizations pays 300 employees this rate, the value for this metric is 300. Organizations should also footnote what the lowest wage paid is in order to enable minimum wage calculations.

To use this metric effectively, organizations working across multiple geographies should capture it at the country level. For each country, organizations should capture the lowest hourly wage paid and the number of employees earning that wage. In the event that an organization is unable to capture these data for each country, organizations are encouraged to capture this metric for the country with the largest number of employees. 

For salaried workers, organizations may calculate hourly wage by dividing total annual wages by number of hours worked. This metric can be useful in capturing whether a portion of the organization's workforce is paid less than minimum wage. Organizations interested in capturing minimum wage or living wage may instead use Employees Earning Minimum Wage (OI5858) and Employees Earning a Living Wage or Higher (OI4724). 

In some contexts, this metric can serve as an indicator of whether the outcome being sought by an investor or organization is occurring (the WHAT dimension of impact). For more on the alignment of IRIS metrics to the five dimensions of impact, see IRIS+ and the Five Dimensions of Impact (https://iris.thegiin.org/document/iris-and-the-five-dimensions/). No single metric is sufficient to understand an impact; rather, metrics are selected as a set across all dimensions of impact. When possible, the selection of metrics to measure and describe the five dimensions should be based on best practice and evidence.