Fairphone's chief executive 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 published 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 blocked, after the story is already written,” Monique Lempers, Fairphone’s Chief Impact Officer, writes 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 the world’s 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 Raymond van Eck, CEO of Fairphone, referring to the ‘living wage bonus’ his company pays workers to close the gap between their real wage and the local living wage. “There is no financial excuse for the broader industry 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 does not mention specific manufacturers by name in the report, but Lempers told me in an interview that the research “confirms a substantial gap between the legal minimums and the incomes necessary for basic social participation in major manufacturing centers.”

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

It’s clear, then, that Fairphone doesn’t necessarily have large-scale corporations like Apple and Samsung in its sights. And, in fact, in its latest Supply Chain Progress Report, Apple notes that it is taking “comprehensive steps to confirm fair and legal compensation of salaries and bonuses based on accurate measurements of time worked.”

However, it should be noted that foreign contractors used by companies like Apple and Samsung do not necessarily meet the same standards as their clients.

In 2025, the world reported that the “base 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 also now assembled in India (via The Financial Times), and neither China nor India have a legally mandated national living wage.

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

samsung factory

(Image credit: Samsung.com)

Clearly, monitoring and enforcing labor standards is a complex task for all multinational technology companies (Apple itself acknowledges that “the scale and scope of [its] The 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 published an official guide to paying living wages across a supply chain in 2022, has outlined three more broad strategic changes that it hopes even the biggest tech brands can implement in the future:

Design for longevity: adopting modular and repairable designs, moving from selling disposable devices to supporting long-term ownership, physically offsetting your waste footprint.
Systemic restoration: Going beyond a risk and ‘do no harm’ approach, ensuring living wages for factory workers and supporting professionalization and the delivery of greater value to artisanal mining to uplift communities rather than boycott them.
Integrated Impact: Ultimately, we want social and ecological health to become core business KPIs, ensuring profits are no longer decoupled from the well-being of the planet and its people.

A headshot of Monique Lempers, Fairphone's impact director

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

The smartphone industry is at least waking up to the importance of sustainable business practices, particularly 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 adopt USB-C charging on its iPhones.

But Fairphone wants manufacturers to make the leap before they come under pressure.

“Europe’s ecodesign and due diligence standards are raising the bar, while climate pressure and geopolitical tension are exposing how fragile global supply chains have become,” says Lempers. “But compliance is just the starting point. The point is not to do the minimum required. The point is to raise the bar, demonstrate that it can be done, and make it impossible for the rest of the industry to continue pretending that change is unrealistic.”