Fairphone CEO says there is “no financial excuse” for smartphone makers to pay their workers less than the living wage, as the sustainable electronics maker shares its 2025 impact report.

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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 for their respective workforces.

“In much of the tech industry, impact is still treated as a shadow. It follows the product after launch, once the supply chain is locked down, once the story is already written,” writes Monique Lempers, director of impact at Fairphone, in the report. “People shouldn’t have to trade their health for a paycheck, and communities shouldn’t have to absorb the hidden cost of global electronics.”

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“At just over $1 per device, achieving a living wage is a negligible fraction of the retail price of a smartphone,” adds Fairphone CEO Raymond van Eck, referring to the “living wage bonus” his company pays workers to close the gap between their actual wage and the local living wage. “There is no financial excuse for the industry as a whole not to do the same.”

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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 manufacturers by name in the report, but Lempers told me in an interview that the research “confirms a substantial gap between legal minimums and the income required for basic social participation in major manufacturing hubs.”

“In the consumer electronics industry, a large portion of the production workforce earns significantly less than the living wage. […] In general, this disparity results from a “margin-technology” correlation: high-tech companies with better margins tend to offer better wages, while lower-tech, lower-margin companies are more likely to have the largest wage gaps.

It is therefore clear that Fairphone does not necessarily have large companies like Apple and Samsung in its sights. And indeed, in its latest supply chain progress report, Apple notes that it is taking “extensive steps to confirm fair and legal compensation of wages and bonuses based on accurate measurements of time worked.”

It should be noted, however, that the foreign subcontractors used by Apple and Samsung do not necessarily meet the same standards as their customers.

In 2025, The World reported that “the base salary of an iPhone assembler at Foxconn is $295 per month” – the legal minimum, but a little less than half the average salary in Zhengzhou. Around 20% of all iPhones are also now assembled in India (via the Financial Times), and neither China nor India has a legally mandated national wage.

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

Samsung factory

(Image credit: Samsung.com)

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

But Fairphone – which has actually published an official guide on paying a living wage in a supply chain in 2022 – has outlined three broader strategic changes that it hopes even the biggest tech brands can implement in the future:

Design for longevity: By adopting modular and repairable designs, moving from selling disposable gadgets to supporting long-term ownership, while physically offsetting their waste footprint.
Systemic restoration: moving beyond a risk and “do no harm” approach, ensuring living wages for factory workers and supporting professionalization and higher value distribution to artisanal mining operations to uplift communities rather than boycott them.
Integrated impact: ultimately, we want social and ecological health to become KPIs at the heart of our activity, ensuring that profit is no longer decoupled from the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants.

A photo of Monique Lempers, Chief Impact Officer at Fairphone

Monique Lempers, Director of Impact at Fairphone (Image credit: Fairphone)

The smartphone industry is at least waking up to the importance of sustainable business practices, especially in Europe, where politicians are actively working to eliminate the concept of planned obsolescence. For example, recently announced European laws will require all new smartphones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries and at least seven years of replacement parts. You can also thank the EU for “encouraging” Apple to adopt USB-C charging on its iPhones.

But Fairphone wants manufacturers to jump before being pushed.

“EU rules on ecodesign and due diligence are raising the bar, while climate pressure and geopolitical tensions reveal how fragile global supply chains have become,” says Lempers. “But compliance is only the starting line. The goal is not to do the minimum required. The goal is to raise the bar, prove it can be done, and prevent the rest of the industry from continuing to pretend that change is unrealistic.”