Fairphone CEO says there is ‘no financial excuse’ for smartphone makers to pay their workers less than a living wage, as sustainable electronics maker shares its 2025 Impact Report

Sustainability Week 2025

This article is part of a series of sustainability themed articles we are running to observe Earth Day 2026 and promote more sustainable practices. See all our content in Sustainability Week 2026.

Fairphone has released its 2025 Impact Report, and the sustainability-focused electronics maker is calling on all smartphone makers to implement a fair living wage across their respective workforces.

“In much of the tech industry, impact is still treated as a shadow. It follows the product after launch, after the supply chain is locked, after the story has already been written,” writes Monique Lempers, Chief Impact Officer at Fairphone, in the report. “People shouldn’t have to trade their health for a paycheck, and societies shouldn’t have to absorb the hidden costs of the world’s electronics.”

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“At just over $1 per device, earning a living wage is a tiny fraction of a smartphone’s retail price,” adds Fairphone CEO Raymond van Eck, referring to the ‘living wage bonus’ his company pays workers to bridge the gap between their actual wages and the local living wage. “There is no financial excuse for the wider industry not to follow suit.”

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An extract from Fairphone’s 2025 Impact Report detailing its ‘Living Wage Bonus’ initiative(Image credit: Fairphone)

Fairphone doesn’t name specific producers in the report, but Lempers told me in an interview that research “confirms a significant gap between legal minimums and the income required for basic social participation in large production centers.”

“Across the consumer electronics industry, a large segment of the manufacturing workforce earns significantly less than a living wage […] Generally, this difference follows a ‘margin-tech’ correlation: high-tech companies with better margins tend to offer better pay, while lower-tech operations with lower margins are most likely to have the largest pay differentials.”

It is therefore clear that Fairphone does not necessarily have large companies such as Apple and Samsung in its sights. And indeed, in its latest Supply Chain Progress Report, Apple notes that it is taking “extensive steps to verify fair and lawful compensation of wages and bonuses based on accurate measures of time worked.”

However, it should be noted that overseas contractors used by Apple and Samsung do not necessarily adhere to the same standards as their customers.

In 2025, Le Monde reported that “the basic salary for an iPhone assembler at Foxconn is $295 per month”—the legal minimum, but just under half the average salary in Zhengzhou. Around 20% of all iPhones are now also assembled in India (via The Financial Times), and neither China nor India have a legally mandated national living wage.

Samsung does not publish a similar annual supply chain report, but in response to a 2024 wage strike at a Samsung factory in India, the company said it “maintains absolute compliance with all existing labor laws.”

samsung factory

(Image credit: Samsung.com)

Obviously, monitoring and enforcing labor standards is a complex task for any multinational technology company (Apple itself acknowledges that “the scope and scale of [its] supply chain makes it a complex and dynamic operating environment spanning more than 50 countries and regions with different laws and cultural norms”).

But Fairphone – which actually released an official guide to paying the living wage in a supply chain back in 2022 – has outlined three more general strategic changes it hopes even the biggest tech brands can implement going forward:

Design for longevity: By adopting modular, repairable designs, move from selling disposable gadgets to supporting long-term ownership while physically offsetting their waste footprint.
Systemic recovery: Moving beyond a risk and ‘do no harm’ approach by securing living wages for factory workers and by supporting professionalisation and higher value distribution for artisanal mining to uplift communities rather than boycott them.
Integrated Impact: Ultimately, we want to see social and ecological health become core business KPIs, ensuring that profit is no longer decoupled from the well-being of the planet and its people.

A headshot of Monique Lempers, Chief Impact Officer at Fairphone

Monique Lempers, Chief Impact Officer at Fairphone (Image credit: Fairphone)

At least the smartphone industry is waking up to the importance of sustainable business practices, especially in Europe, where politicians are actively working to eliminate the concept of planned obsolescence. Recently announced EU laws, for example, will force all new smartphones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries and at least seven years of spare parts. You can also thank the EU for ‘encouraging’ Apple to introduce USB-C charging on its iPhones.

But Fairphone wants manufacturers to jump before they are pushed.

“Europe’s Ecodesign and due diligence rules are raising the bar, while climate pressures and geopolitical stresses are revealing how fragile global supply chains have become,” says Lempers. “But compliance is only the starting line. The point is not to do the bare minimum. The point is to raise the bar, prove it can be done, and make it impossible for the rest of the industry to keep pretending that change is unrealistic.”