Can you hear me? Aha, wonderful. I'll put this one down. So I'm Michael Ford. I work for Canonical on a project called Juju that's written and go. I've been a Python developer for about 13 years now and a Python core developer for about eight of those years. I released or created Unit Test 2 and the mock library which reflects my particular interest and my particular passion for testing. I think good testing practices are the only ways or certainly an important part of keeping developers sane. And this is this is my colleague and actually my boss Demeter. Can you hear me? Demeter, I don't know. I work with Michael in Canonical on the hopefully next generation cloud orchestration framework suite system. Juju, here is our talk about it. So the talk is called to the clouds and it's about deploying applications and services to the clouds and why you should probably be deploying to the cloud even if you don't want to. Because we're talking about the cloud, we're going to have a lot of buzzwords. The cloud is a piece of jargon that's had a lot of hype over the last decade really. And I'm hoping that in this talk we'll rehabilitate the term a little bit and show how despite the hype there's actually a useful set of technologies and principles behind this. So this photo rather stretched I'm afraid is actually one of the original computers that Google used in the early days of their search engine. And part of their genius which I think was actually forced on the mobile out of necessity than directly entirely out of genius was they built their service using cheap commodity hardware rather than the very expensive big iron mainframes that their competitors were using. And a consequence of this was that they were able to scale out very rapidly, very easily and very cheaply just by buying new units of inexpensive commodity hardware. But because this hardware wasn't as reliable as the big iron mainframes that other people were using, they built on top of it this false tolerant architecture that as well as enabling them to add new units of hardware to their system also allowed them to take out failing hardware. They eventually released this platform as a service as Google App Engine. Amazon kind of took this to the next level with their infrastructure that they used for running a giant retail website. They took a slightly different approach providing a host of virtual machines as deployment targets for their services. And this infrastructure as a service approach rather than the platform as a service approach is really loved by developers because it just gives them a machine and when they just have a machine they know what to do with it, they know how to deploy to it. And so when Amazon made their cloud public, they rapidly became the dominant player in the public cloud market and other modern infrastructure as a service. Public clouds include HP cloud, Microsoft Azure, Joy-Ent, OpenStack based offerings, a whole host of them. So there are several problems that using the cloud solves. And these include dependency hell, resource underutilisation and hardware management. And the way the cloud solves these problems is by separating the deployment target, your deployment layer from your hardware layer. So when you deploy to the cloud you're deploying to virtual machines without having to care about what physical machines that your service is actually running on. So resource underutilisation or equally resource overutilisation, a situation you might be familiar with, you have to deploy a new small public service say or an email server, a dev wiki bug tracker. So you need a new machine and you deploy stuff to it and you're using about 10% of its capacity. Or alternatively you work in a company where getting new hardware is a really slow and painful process.  Dependency hell, again situations that you may be familiar with, you have a whole bunch of applications and services. Some of them use the same library, they have the same dependency, but they use different versions of the same library. So you have these applications that you can't deploy on the same machine, they have to be located on physically different machines. Or alternatively you do the work, you make sure they're all using the same version of the library. And then what happens is you want to use some fancy new feature that comes in a newer version of the library. So you deploy that for one application, you forget about the other services and your deployment breaks another application. Now obviously all Python libraries take backwards compatibility very seriously, so this never happens in practice. But I've had to do emergency rollbacks of deployments because we upgraded a dependency, we forgot there's some other application on the same box using the same dependency and it just broke. Or alternatively you do the work and you port all your applications at the same time to use the new version of the library.  And then there's a regression in one of your applications and you have to roll back all of them at the same time. There are various ways of solving this, you can deploy all your services to separate machines and then you're back into resource underutilisation. Or you can use virtual M to provide isolated deployment environments for all of your application. Again this is something that I've done. But what you then have is you then have the same libraries in multiple different locations in non-standard places on the file system. And that's a security problem and system administrators, they tend to hate this solution because they like to understand and preferably be able to control dependencies. So an alternative approach is for every service that you run or even every component of every service that you run to have that in its own virtual machine where you're able to very tightly control and specify the dependencies just for this application. And then hardware management, that's one of the most important benefits of the cloud. Because we have this separation of our deployment layer from our physical layer we're able to deploy new services just by acquiring a new virtual machine. We're able to add new machines to the cluster very easily and we're able to take out failing machines, upgrade machines without shutting down running services. Okay next slide I think. So it may be the case that you're already running a bunch of services, you may have hundreds of servers, you may have just a few.  Maybe you don't want your data located in America or hosted by an American company. And you can get some of the benefits that I've talked about just by managing virtual machines on your own servers. You get this, the isolated environment. But wouldn't it be nice if there was a framework that provided the dynamic server management aspects of this that was able to provide, automatically provide you with new virtual machines, automatically provide you with new deployment targets and make it easier to add machines and take machines out. And that's what you really want is a private cloud. And if what you want is a private cloud, that probably means you want to open stack. Our PDF export screwed up the bullet points there. Sorry about that. So open stack is basically the private cloud. It's not entirely the only option but it's the giant in the world and it's written in Python. It's probably one of the biggest things going on in the Python world right now. So there are lots of companies, both big and small, hiring Python developers to work on the cloud, either directly on open stack or on specific implementations of clouds, both public and private, using open stack. Open stack is huge. It's huge in terms of the amount of code. It's huge in terms of the amount of sub projects within open stack. Huge in terms of the functionality it provides and huge in terms of the number of people using it and contributing it. And you can get all the benefits of the cloud but without having to use somebody else's implementation. Oh, let's go back to the last slide. Just to mention that there are alternatives. Eucalyptus certainly used to be an alternative cloud implementation. They got acquired. I think they got acquired by somebody, by a company that has a public cloud offering using open stack. So I don't even know if eucalyptus currently exists. And there's an alternative data centre technology that I've worked with a bit called Mars, metal as a service, and that's another canonical product. And that gives you a lot of the benefits of the cloud, the dynamic server management aspects of it, but with physical hardware rather than virtual machines. And Juju, the project that we work on, you can deploy open stack to Mars or you can deploy directly to Mars with Juju. And it achieves full density, full resource utilisation with Mars through using Lexi or KVM containers as deployment targets on the physical machine. So it's an interesting technology. Sort of a data centre level technology sits below the level of open stack. So the benefits of the cloud, solving the problems of dependency hell, hardware management, resource under utilisation. Alongside that, if you have fully automated deployments, then the other big benefits that you get from the cloud are you get the ability to rapidly scale out and easily deploy new services. And you only get those if you have fully automated deployments. And an important principle for fully automated deployments are that we treat our servers as livestock rather than pets. So if you have a pet, your pet is unique. Your pet has a name. Do you name servers in the company you work for? So they all have names. And if your pet gets ill, you spend a lot of time and money and effort on getting it well again. Whereas livestock, livestock, they don't tend to have names. They have numbers.   And this is how we should be treating our servers. Deploying new services. We ought to be able to tear down our application servers, reprovision them with a single command without caring about what physical machine they're located on. Without caring anything about the machine they're located on virtual machine or physical machine. And without preferably without having to worry about machine configuration. Now the trouble is with infrastructure as a service, which has largely beaten platform as a service in the market by the way, except for some specific platforms like Salesforce. Infrastructure as a service is largely one. Developers like it because the paradigm it provides is you have a machine to deploy to. And what that means is although we leave some problems behind, the problems of well how do we provision, how do we configure, how do we manage those machines, how do we administer them. We just take those problems with us when we go to the cloud. Now there are lots of tools out there that will help you with machine provisioning. Chef, puppet, salt stack, ansible. Some people use Docker although that's really about image based workflows. It's not really, but some people are using it in this way to help with the problem of machine provisioning. But these tools all require you to think about machine provisioning. What's going to live on this machine? How do I configure and administer this machine? And as developers or even DevOps, we don't really want to spend our time worrying about machine configuration or administration, or at least that's not how I think about the services that I deploy. When I deploy an application or I deploy a service stack, what I think about is I think about the components. I have my application server, I have a message queue, I have load balancers, I have a database. And these components are all related to each other. They're all interrelated. They all communicate. This is how I think about my application stack. But the actual deployment, we tend to, we're forced into thinking about our services in different ways. We're forced into thinking in terms of units of machines. And juju is a tool that takes a slightly different approach. So this diagram shows that this is through the GUI. The GUI, you don't have to use the GUI, of course, but it's a great way of visualising services. This shows deployed and related services deployed with juju. And the lines there show the relationships between the components of the services. So juju takes a different approach. It's about service orchestration. It's a tool that provides a powerful service modelling language that just happens to use virtual machines as a deployment target. The basic unit for deployment for services or service components in juju is the charm. And the charm no codifies the knowledge required to deploy and configure that application. This is a very important principle of DevOps, a principle of automated deployment, is that the knowledge about how to deploy and configure your service components rather than living in some system administrator's head and then that system administrator gets a better job somewhere else. And like Guido said in his talk this morning, they have deployed services using binaries and nobody knows how to get those binaries back. So if some disaster occurs, presumably they have lots and lots of backups because they can't reproduce, they don't have a repeatable full stack deployment, they can't automate and reproduce that. You need to have your deployment knowledge codified. And charms for juju are the codified knowledge about how to, not just how to deploy the service, but how it communicates with other services. And these charms tend to be written in Python. So when you're using juju, you get to codify your deployment knowledge in Python. But not just that then. Through the charm store, there's a whole host of common infrastructure components, many of which you're already using, I'm sure, where there are existing charms out there. So juju is sometimes called apt get for the web. So why juju? I've kind of talked about some of these. We get to think in terms of service orchestration, think in terms of service components, how they relate and connect to each other, which is how we think about our application stack anyway. We get to work with Python to do all this. Cloud independence is important as well. Juju will happily deploy using exactly the same configuration to Azure, Joy Ant, HP Cloud, EC2, Mars, and also using Lexi containers to your local machine, which is not just to your local machine, to your CI server. So you can take exactly the same production deployment configuration. You can deploy that locally for running your own manual test. But your CI server can also take that, can spin up the whole production stack, configure the communication, configure things to talk to each other, and you can run your acceptance tests on your CI server, using effectively your production configuration. Now, you are running CI tests, you are running acceptance tests for your applications, I assume. Like I said, I have a particular interest in testing, and I think a good principle with testing is if it isn't tested, it's broken. If it is tested, it might not be broken. Those are the principles I work to. So testing doesn't guarantee that things work. What it does is provide an assurance that things might work. You need that assurance. And through the charm store, there are many charms available. Things like Hadoop, Ceph, Postgres, Django applications, MySQL, did I say Postgres? All of the standard components, they are all charmed up there and ready to deploy. So let's look at an example deployment of a Django app. We have ten minutes left, time has flown. Demeter is going to show you, it's a Django app called D-Paste, using the Django framework charm. This is one we already have deployed, but this is a full stacker, and I'll let Demeter take over and talk about it. All right. So as you can see here, well, the resolution is not very good, but you have services represented as boxes, and this is all you really care about in your deployment. You don't really care that much about machines, you care about your workloads, and also how are they related to each other. And as we can see, we have a Django framework charm here, which is a modified version of the default charm available in the charm store, and it's configured to run D-Paste, pulling the Git repo from GitHub, and there are a few other things like a squid proxy, and also a couple of HA proxy charms, which are configured as application load balancer and cache load balancer. We have the front-end Apache and also the back-end Postgres database. This is the Djugu itself, which is also a charm that you may or may not deploy if you don't want to, and this here is the G Unicorn, which is a subordinate charm to D-Paste. What does that mean? It means that with each and every unit of D-Paste, there is a G Unicorn deployed alongside it, so it can be used, for example, for logging or other closely related services, which depend on each other. Also, so this is the service view, this is the default view you can see, and here we have the machine view, which shows that we have eight machines, actually, like C containers, and what services they're running on, If these were physical machines, this is all running on the laptop using the local provider that I mentioned, so they're lexie containers that these services are running in, which is why hardware details are not available. If these were running on virtual machines, the hardware constraints of the actual machines would be visible here. Also, I'll come back to this, but you can also use the command line to do the same sort of inspection and management. For example, if I do the status format short, that's just the gist of what I have in my deployment, and if I want to, I can show a lot more details about it, like what sort of workload status it is for each term, what relations there are, what IP addresses, when it was deployed, and so on. And there is even a status history that shows, for example, I deployed this charm, but it didn't come up, or like it's waiting for some sort of interaction, like I need to enter database details, or I need to do something manually in order to enable it to work. Also, we can easily do, well, not quite right now because the network is non-existent, but I would have shown you the same exact deployment than in Amazon. It's actually running. If you can hit this. I can show you whoever is interested later. Any questions, of course, are welcome. So what you can do with this, you can actually see what are the details of each service, you can see what units are running on it, what's the configuration, there are lots of things that you can tweak for each charm, and this is also part of what the charm encapsulates as a best practice. What we could do here is, you saw that there was one running unit. If we needed to scale out our app, we would do juju, ad unit, I think Django, whatever this charm is called, five, and that would create five new units. But because the Django charm is related to the Postgres database, so as the new units come up, there's a juju knows these need to be related to the database, and charms are comprised of hooks, which are code that can run. If we go on to, if we go back to the slides, we'll have to fly through these because we have just five minutes, but there's a charm that says relation joined. So the new unit of the application server has joined the Postgres database, so it knows the configuration information. The Postgres charm, we don't need to generate a password and a user for the app, for the database, sorry. This is all done as part of the charm. On install, on startup, a new database user is created, and then as the relationship is joined to the application server, that information is passed through, that configuration is automatically given to the application server. As we add new units of the application server, that configuration is given, information is given to the new units. So these services are automatically added and configured to talk through the relationships that we've defined. They're automatically configured to talk to the rest of the application. So it's not just the deployment information that's codified into the charm, but the configuration information, how to talk to other units of the service, and as we add new units, this reconfiguration, this updated configuration, happens automatically for us. This is service orchestration. You can see this isn't the directory tree but the actual charm is just a zip archive. And you can see here that all of the different hooks that fire when different things happen, they're actually symlinked to a single Python file.  On to the next slide. So we're actually using a deployer bundle here, which is a YAML file that you can keep under version control. Deployer is a separate tool that the functionality is now being rolled into JuJu call. And you can see for the Django charm that we're using, that there's a whole bunch of configuration information stored in there. And if we go on to the next slide, the relationships between the charms and the other components of the service that we're using are also defined in the deployer bundle. So as you can see, there's an awful lot to JuJu. There's an awful lot more we could talk about. But the basic principle of codifying our deployment and configuration information in Python, being able to reuse the existing charms using virtual machines as a deployment target to get us the benefits of the cloud of separating our deployment layer from our physical hardware. And with JuJu, being able to then just retarget that at multiple backends is a very powerful combination. I think we'll... And this is just an example of how easy it is to do this deployment. We'll make the slides available as the last... If we go to the last slide, that has a URL, and I'll tweet it and Demeter will tweet it. This is deployer doing its stuff. But I think that's about all we have time to for. And the slides are available. And there is also documentation and all the different concepts of JuJu explained on JuJuChallenge.com. There is also a live demo that you can use as a sandbox to do experimental deployments. You can then export that as a YAMO file and then deploy it as we show with the JuJu deployer to your cloud or to your local machine. OK, thank you very much. Do we have time for some questions? There's a couple of questions. I see JuJu like something more top-able than a puppet salt or any of these. But I don't really see how complex could it be because when you have some simple applications, you usually can configure them with free parameters or so. But usually the applications that I'm listing in my company with target are really, really complex. Where we need to have like four dot jams, three exams, XMLs, two database connections, et cetera. And they are configured differently. So at the end, the edge cases you have are really, really complex. How would JuJu scale with complexity of an application? So there are quite a few very complex charms that have certainly in the order of tens of configuration options, which are things that the deployer YAMO, obviously they all have same defaults, but there are many tens of configuration options that you can tweak in the deployer YAMO. What we tend to see people doing is, for their own applications, they will write their own charm. Possibly taking like the Django framework charm there, taking that as a base if you're deploying a Django app. You can have fat charms that contain the application bundle itself and extra configuration information so you could merely specify the paths to the configuration files within the charm bundle. And so you would have your own charm that is specific to your application. And then you would reuse existing charms for the other component pieces that are deployed alongside it. And the good thing about charms is that we showed an example in Python, but they're actually language agnostic. So you can, for example, using Chef or Puppet or Ansible, you could reuse the same language. You can use Bash or whatever you like. We have a very good support for Python, like nice tools, libraries, unit tests support, coverage and benchmarking as well. One of the things to note is that under the hood, of course, for an individual service component, Djugu is doing machine provisioning. The difference is that at the modelling layer you're not thinking in terms of machine provisioning. So Djugu really works alongside these tools. And you can see that this particular charm, it has a fab file, it has Ansible.py. This particular Django framework charm here, I don't know if it still is, but at the point that this demo was originally created, was actually using Ansible and Fabric for doing the service installation and machine configuration. I can see that Djugu can be useful for provisioning services where the basic building block is like a container or something, or like anything that runs on the top of VM or a machine that's already running, let's say. But is Djugu the right tool or is it intended to be the tool that you can use for actually spinning up all the VMs in the cloud and talk to Google Cloud API or AWS API or any... This sort of task, is that... Well, so if you just want something to manage your cloud... Yeah, I mean Google Compute Engine, AWS or all of these things. You do Djugu add machine, it will create a new virtual machine for you. You can then use that, you can specify the machine, you can create containers on those virtual machines and deploy components to those machines. Djugu SSH machine number gives you an SSH connection to that specific virtual machine. So if you just want something to spin up virtual machines or alternative workload targets, there are then Djugu actions that allow you to run specific commands on those machines. So you kind of can use it in that way. It's not entirely the intended use case. So it has the integration with some other APIs? It has it with all the cloud providers that are supported, so Google Compute Engine, AWS, Joints, HP Cloud, Azure, Joints. Yes, it has within its knowledge of how to talk to those APIs, how to create the virtual machines, how to destroy the virtual machines, how to connect to them, some aspects of how to configure networking on them, this kind of stuff. It has to do that because it's doing the machine provisioning for you. A question on... You mentioned that your machine should be treated like livestock. How do you deploy configuration changes? Do you take down the machine as an immutable server pattern? Or do you reapply... ...re-apply the changes? Right, so the idea is that you go away from the actual machine configuration and instead codify what configuration your service needs within the charm. And then, if you need to change that configuration, you specify like either tweak charm config settings or you relate it to something else which provides the functionality it needs. So the actual configuration happens automatically depending on how the charm is written. So if, for example, your charm is written both as a standalone application and as a clustering solution, if you just add more units to it, then the charm will automatically discover those other units and set up clustering in the same way. And there is a concept of a charm upgrade where there's a new version of a charm and individual units can be upgraded to the next version of the charm. More questions? What do you have for auto scaling like a load balancer and deploying new servers on demand? So this is kind of a high level feature on top of what Juju currently provides. There are plans to do things like auto scaling while balancing as part of the set of features that we provide. That's not yet there. But it's being worked on. It's also... We mentioned that Juju's open source were accepting contributions. It's on GitHub. I think the standard answer is landscape will do scaling on top of Juju. Lou, how is it different than OpenStacks Heat and Murano? So it's different that it's not targeting... I'm not quite familiar with both of those in detail. But I think that the thing is Juju is not prescribing a certain sort of cloud that it can orchestrate. For example, I know Heat orchestrates OpenStack. Whereas with Juju, you can orchestrate OpenStack and other clouds just as well with the same set of features and steps. More questions? It is just a very quick question. How popular is Juju with respect to other similar services like Chef or Ansible? So Juju is... It's fully open source developed by Canonical. We're using it a great deal with our customers. This is how and why Juju exists. We have cloud customers with large deployments. Often, but not only large deployments of OpenStack where we either set it up or manage the deployment for them. So this is how we're using Juju. So Juju is quite battle tested and is getting refined based on those experiences. And there is community uses. There's particular community around the channel creation. I don't think in terms of the wider community it's as widely used as Chef and Prophet. I think the DevOps kind of mindset is still used to thinking in terms of machine provisioning. So they look for tools to do machine provisioning. And the idea of service orchestration although Juju's been around for a while service orchestration as a concept and a way of thinking I think it matches more directly the way developers think about their application components. But it's something that's only gaining traction. Because we're seeing the community of charm creators those are obviously people who are using Juju. And since recently like last year we had a lot of big contributions like we're working with our partner's cloud base which actually ported cloud in it for Windows and Sentos as well and I think there is a... This is a Romanian company who were using Juju. They had a customer who needed Windows workloads so they did the work to Juju now deploys Windows workloads and Juju runs fully on Sentos as well as Ubuntu. For Windows you need an Ubuntu Juju state server to manage the applications but it will deploy two Windows machines. But for Sentos you can have a fully Sentos Juju installed if you want. And that's on the server side. On the client side the client is available for Windows, Linux and Mac and pretty much any platform that Go runs on because it's written in Go. More questions? Thank you very much. Thank you.


Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the fourth and last in the current round of our webinars profiling some of the research work that we're doing within the Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellowship Programme at CISL. Really, really pleased you could join us and I'm sure this is going to be a very exciting topic from two very exciting people here at CISL, Anna Barford and Marina Zerilla. The topic is super interesting. It's on living wages in complex value chains and how companies are adopting them and I'll say just a tiny bit of introduction about that in the second. What I wanted to say first of all is that the actual program from where this work comes out of is called the Global Sustainability Fellowship Programme, the Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellowship Programme and that is supported by a range of different companies and foundations to enable us to conduct research work which is very focused on problem solving within the business and policy community. It has strong academic foundations but it is also very deliberately targeting impact in the real world and I think hopefully this presentation from Anna and Marina will illustrate that. This particular research is supported very generously by Unilever. Some of the previous presentations we've had in this series have been from other companies like AstraZeneca, from Sainsbury's and others. This one's supported by Unilever. It's independent research however which draws on the best approach which the university and universities generally have adopted in really getting to grips with global evidence and thinking behind the topic area. So hopefully this will be of interest to you. Now I did notice, I'm Jake Reynolds by the way, from CSL. I'm responsible for our research programme here at the Institute. I did notice looking at the participation we have banks, investors, insurance companies, retailers, manufacturers, foundations, academic organisations. It's a usefully diverse group and has been in each of these webinars which we are providing and I think in some ways diversity is particularly well suited to this topic of living wage because every organisation has to be thinking about this. This is an issue for all organisations. In fact not only private sector but public sector too and indeed not only the organisations directly but their client bases. Who are they working with? Who are they working for? And also their supply chains and in fact their stakeholder communities generally. So I'm hoping very much that the topic when Anna and Maruna present it will elicit thinking in your own minds about how this whole era of living wages might be applied in your own context or in your own industries or communities and that you will wish to pose questions to them for probably the half now that we'll have after their presentation and if you please could enter those questions that you have into the into the go to meeting question space that would be fantastic. We will then extract them and I can play them back to my colleagues here after their presentation. So just in terms of how we what we're going to cover today and exactly the topic area, fair wages have been on the agenda for an awfully long time. It's surprising in some ways that we have you know over a century but it's surprising that despite the international commitments from everywhere from the UN downwards we still have millions of people living on what you might describe as poverty wages and this has costs for obviously for the workers themselves, the families and the businesses that they work for too. It's always been a concern but in the wake of the COVID pandemic and many other social movements which have been you know very vocal and very important over the last few years socialists have really surged up the corporate agenda and living wage is among them and it's receiving considerable attention at the current time and some companies as we know including Unilever have made bold commitments to apply them right the way through their supply networks to attempt to end work poverty. So Anna and Marina will walk us through what living wages are, why they're needed, they'll provide a couple of case studies and an honest assessment I think of some of the issues that companies are currently facing as they seek to apply them. Anna is a Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellow and her research into the potential for decent work in the circular economy has led her to focus on living wages as a key metric of decent work and this complements her wider interests in addressing a deficit in jobs in lower income countries and how young people can get by when the labor market demand for them is weak. On the other hand Marina is a research assistant here at CSL she's focused on living wages across global supply chains and she has an unfil in development studies from the University of Cambridge and experience of working in corporate social responsibility and development consulting and her academic interests lie at if you like the intersection of economic development climate change and inequalities. So having just explained a tiny bit about the the fellowship program itself introduced the topic area and the two people who are going to present it I'd like to hand over to I think Anna probably you'll kick off now we will come back to audience questions afterwards so if I could just reiterate do put your questions into the system and I will attempt my best to to moderate them after the presentation so over to you Anna. Excellent and thank you very much Jake and welcome everyone to our webinar it's great that you're able to make time today to join us so Marina has been working with me since last summer and we've really been trying to understand this new wave of commitments to paying living wage is so until until a few years ago quite a lot of living wage commitments were really focused directly on the organization and its direct employees and then to some extent there the people they were contracting to do work but then kind of in the past few years has been this kind of new wave of commitments which are really looking at living wages but actually can throughout supply chains or throughout value chains which is a very exciting departure as Jake said because of the potential it brings to influence norms around pay and the actual practice of pay and to shift us from what to date has been an overwhelming kind of rhetoric of you know how much can we get for how much for how little money from workers to a way of thinking about pay in terms of how do we address make sure that workers are paid enough to address their needs and to pay for the basics in life as well as have some something to spare for for if there's a crisis or an emergency as well so it's really a kind of a shift in what what businesses and other organizations are looking for in terms of what they pay and why they're thinking about paying more than they might have previously been aiming to. We're speaking to you from the University of Cambridge as you know and I'm really pleased to say you know this isn't a movement which is limited to corporations so the university started paying the real living wage in 2014 but then in 2018 they actually pushed it up above the UK real living wage to a higher level of 10 pounds an hour which is the Cambridge living wage which was a kind of more locally defined living wage and the reason they did this is because as some of you may know the cost of living in Cambridge is higher than the UK average so then using a UK level living wage doesn't necessarily give people enough to live in the Cambridge context and this is why we're talking about living wages in plural because the cost of living varies so much place to place and this is one of the complications as well that when you start thinking about how you're going to pay your workers through supply chains you have to work out the different costs of living in different parts of the world very often especially when those supply chains are very extended you might be wondering like why is this an issue why have we not solved it already as Jake said you know we've had more than 100 years of people demanding fair pay for the work that people have done and you know to some extent that has been addressed statutory minimum wages are already kind of playing a really important role in bringing up the minimum wage but it's not to date it's not been enough so that's where the kind of the need for voluntary commitments has come in from from corporations in particular which we're speaking about today and like we know low pay is an issue here's some examples of some news headlines which point to some of the issues that we see surrounding low pay so for instance low pay driving poverty and inequality low pay meaning that there's a risk that your workers all leave en masse because they're not actually able to afford to live based on the pay that they're receiving or the risk that workers do stay but they struggle to make ends meet and they really struggle to get by and make a decent life for themselves because they're not paid enough and it's a day to day struggle a day to day stress that they're facing as a result of the low level of pay they're receiving there's also the issue that some companies have pledged to increase pay but it's not always happened and you know sometimes that's it could be for many different reasons but one of the reasons is it can be hard to make sure that money gets to the people that it's intended to go to so there's lots of kind of different issues that people are facing but overall we can see that it's a recurring issue and something that doesn't need to be addressed next slide thank you so just to think a bit more broadly about kind of what what's the issue globally when we're looking at pay currently um 630 million people are in working poverty so just to be really clear this is people who are working they're active in the labour market which you know some rhetoric kind of says you know you should you should work and then that will solve the problem but people who are already working but the level of income they're getting from that work isn't enough to lift them out of poverty and for this particular statistic the the definition is the the line of moderate poverty so 3.2 dollars a day PPP so purchasing power parity just to be really clear this isn't just an issue of lower or middle income countries this is very much a global issue so one example of that is that European workers are also relatively high risk from working poverty so one in 10 European workers is at risk from that and we can see that if we if we compare these numbers we compare the 630 million people in working poverty with the people who are on or below the minimum wage which is 327 million we see that actually there's roughly about 300 million people who are earning above the minimum wage but not enough to lift them out of working poverty so that's a huge gap that we're seeing and again it kind of reiterates the point that the minimum wages on their own aren't enough at present and just to to give a bit more information about this this graph actually shows the percentage of employees who are currently covered by minimum wages and we can see that in some parts of the world particularly the Arab states and Africa the percentage of people covered by minimum wages is really really low under under 30 percent but in no continent 100 percent of employees covered by minimum wages so there's kind of two two big issues around this one is minimum wages don't always exist or they don't necessarily apply to particular groups of workers like particularly informal workers for instance and other issues that they're they're set lower than living wages so they don't they're not at the right level and then the third issue would be compliance as well so even if you're covered in the minimum wages at a good level if employees aren't complying then that also means people fall through the gaps so at this stage we just wanted to share a definition of what we really mean by living wages in some senses it's implicit you know earning enough to live on living wages have been talked about for a really long time so the first written record of this is actually from 1894 when the factory textile factory owner and Mark Oldroyd from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire talked about living wages and the benefits and the need for living wages and you'll notice that on this slide it kind of really flags minimum wages offer something to the employee but they also offer something to the employer so they talk about living wages maintaining the worker in the highest state of industrial efficiency so there's clearly some business benefits in there that you know keeping keeping people well paid is is beneficial to the employer but obviously the main point is it's also beneficial to the employee a more recent definition of which there are many but here's a more recent definition which picks up on similar themes in a broad sense but is that the remuneration for a standard working week should be enough to really provide a worker and their family and so it's not just individual level it's kind of family level with the essentials for a decent life which obviously includes food, water, housing, education, healthcare, transport, clothing and other essentials it also includes providing enough to deal with unexpected events so there's some some potential for saving so there's a financial buffer and we know that people are more exposed to shocks and stresses if they don't have that financial buffer available to them so it's really important so now we just want to actually do a quick poll just for fun to offer a way that we can directly engage with you considering we can't see anyone on this call so Becker's going to set that up but the poll is to do with what's the real living wage in the UK and there's quite a few different definitions of living wage is the water's been muddied somewhat because the government brought out its own living wage which is actually the same as the minimum wage so they could have borrowed that language of living wages and applied it to their minimum wage but the government's own version is lower than the living wage foundations living wage which is carefully calculated every year using a basket of different goods to work out how much it costs to live in the UK and then kind of and then applying that to an average sized family and making some assumptions to work out how much people need to earn as an hourly rate based on the assumption of what they need at the end of a working week so you've got about 30 seconds to answer this question just to keep the pace going and the question is what is the hourly real living wage in the UK so that's not the government one that's the living wage foundations one so please quickly choose what you what you think it would be and then Becker can send in the results okay I think that should be about 30 seconds now Becker do we have some some answers I think we'll find the results in just a moment but I'll get started anyway and we'll see we'll see how well we know the details I appreciate that not everyone will be dialing in from the UK either so particularly difficult question if you're if you're not based here but of the different answers we gave they are all actually set levels of wages within the UK so here we go so no one thought 4.30 thank you Becker 4.30 4.30 is actually one of the wage rates available to us that's what an apprentice would be paid in the UK at present no one chose 6.56 this is the minimum wage in the UK if you're aged 18 to 20 at present we've had some people choosing 8.91 so this is the UK governments what they call the the living wage that's for people aged 23 and over the correct answer was 9.90 for the UK real living wage that's how much that's the absolute minimum so that's the the floor not the ceiling of earnings that they they recommend UK wide and most people said that so well done everyone and then the the top one 11 pounds 5p is actually the hourly rate for the London living wage and the living wage foundation calculates a London living wage because as I'm sure everyone even people not based in the UK know the cost of living in London is is exceptionally high and so it's there's a kind of an extra there's a London waiting which you see with many many jobs as well that there's a London waiting so people earn a bit more so they can afford the cost of living there so yeah perhaps we can move back to our our PowerPoint now but I think that the interesting thing here is that's that's the living wage the real living wage isn't differentiated by age whereas these other ones the minimum wage for 18 to 20 year old and then 20 21 and 22 year olds and then 23 plus is differentiated by age so there's this assumption that you need less money if you're younger which may or may not be true depending on your relationship with your parents some of you've moved out of from home or not and Becca is it possible to go back to their PowerPoint please thank you so so then moving on with the presentation just to say a bit more about the need for for living wages the living wage foundation did a survey of UK workers this year and they found that actually low pay really has a strongly detrimental effect on people's overall quality of life so 42% of workers said it impacted their quality of life negatively 23% found that they'd fallen behind with rental mortgages due to their low pay and 28 centres have trouble affording to heat their homes so we can see like low pay is associated with people not being able to meet these basic needs which we talked about but there's also an impact on businesses so the impact of the business impact of low wages includes details like if people are on low wages they might have poorer health because maybe they're going without much food or they're living in colder homes or they're not able to afford the healthcare that they want to access and people can feel less motivated because they they feel less valued by their employer and this can lead to a loss of workers sometimes that applies to direct employees but it can also apply throughout value chains because if people are working value chains are also exposed to the same stresses and strains and they can also experience poor health and poor well-being it can also lead to higher costs of managing labour issues because if there's very often labour issues and labour disputes concerned pay to some extent and it's often a major major issue kind of within those conversations so if you deal with that by just paying people properly and paying them what they need that can also reduce that particular cost of the businesses there's another risk that businesses face from not paying people a decent level of income is that there might be social controversies that stem from that which can result in ultimately reputational damage which can have impacts on investment and also on what consumers want to do regarding your business and there's a wider point that high levels of poverty and high levels of inequality can lead to a detrimental environment for business where there can be high levels of social and economic unrest. I think I'll hand over to Marina who's going to give us some more detailed information about the corporate commitments so let me wait just say thank you Marina. Perfect thank you very much Anna yeah so we now want to talk a little bit more to you about these corporate commitments that we've been researching for the past few months and of course as Anna said earlier they're clearly motivated by those effects that Lopez has on business but of course also on the workers so here on this slide you can see just some not all of the corporate commitments made to living wages both in supply chains and just in direct operations and the sort of timelines of these commitments may vary so for example we have here Unilever and L'Oreal which have committed to living wages by 2030 as well we have Tesco which have started paying living wages to their banana suppliers from January 2022 so they have not yet committed to all supply chains but just certain ones which they can act upon at the moment and all of these different companies they are all on sort of different journeys towards living wages and this is something that we found very often discussed in our in our interviews with companies they were often saying that of course living wages are not something that can be implemented overnight and it really is something that takes time so just for example Patagonia in in 2019 they had 35% of their apparel assembly factories paying workers a living wage on average and looking at the companies that have not yet completely committed to living wages in their entire supply chains we have for example Heineken which are committing to paying fair wages to their direct employees by 2023 as well as their third party employees on site by 2030 and of course them and Natura and Co as well as other multinationals are working towards implementing living wages in their supply chains once they take care of sort of their own operations first which can be done a bit more quickly but on this note we also wanted to kind of focus in on one of the companies that we spoke to during our research and we found their journey very interesting and this is Fairphone which is a depth social enterprise building a market for ethical phones and some of you may already own their phones if you are very much interested in sort of ethical products but what they did is they decided to pay a living wage bonus to all of the workers at their the factory producing their phones in China and how they started doing this is by first reviewing their living wage estimates from the Global Living Wage Coalition and the Asia floor wage so that provided them with one estimate of what's the or a couple estimates of what the living wage should be but in addition to that what they did and what is really important that they did is they consulted workers through a survey and dialogue to find out what they really needed in order to have a decent standard of living and so after all of this they they calculated how much they would need to pay in order to achieve this wage on their production line and they determined that actually was only a fixed bonus of 1.50 euro per phone that would be able to close the living wage gap between the calculated living wage and the Chinese minimum wage and then they incorporated this into the product price and this led to an increase of 0.33 percent per phone however the challenge that of course they encountered is that Fairphone is only one company only one buyer among many from that same factory and so this meant that actually the impact of their living wage contribution is blunted unless other buyers also factor in living wage contributions and in order to kind of solve this issue what they decided to do was first consult the workers on what they thought should be done and how to best distribute the bonus and through this consultation they found that the workers agreed that it was best to actually share the living wage bonus which was meant initially just for Fairphone workers but they wanted to actually share that among all of the workers in the factory and there are certain benefits to this they they say that this better accommodates for any changes in the workforce or the production line and we were told in our interviews as well that it helps to avoid any sort of unwanted conflict or competition or favoritism within the factory so what happens now is that Fairphone and and other workers at the factory they receive this bonus on top of their salary each month and then each year the size of the bonus is re-evaluated in order to integrate new information and any changes in living costs year to year so that was a really interesting kind of perspective that we found just from one of the companies that we spoke to but also through speaking to corporates we were actually told that the financial sector actually plays a really important role in in kind of advancing or encouraging corporates to commit to living wages and so then we also conducted a number of interviews with members of the financial community so we spoke to asset managers asset owners and we did find in fact that they are a really important stakeholder in all of this who have a lot of potential for to drive positive change so just by thinking a bit about sort of what responsible investment can do with regard to living wages firstly investors can consider living wages when building their portfolios so they can incorporate living wages into their into their investment decisions either through integrating living wages in their investment analysis and decisions or through screening in order to include or exclude certain companies based on either their living wage policies or their wage levels as well they can possibly choose to invest in companies that aim to create meaningful jobs in emerging economies and not only as well as providing living wages throughout their supply chains but most often what we found by speaking to asset managers is that the way that they choose to kind of do something about living wages is that they try to improve decent work in living wage practices outcomes and disclosure through their stewardship so most often they will engage with their investing companies and try to find ways in which they can improve these practices and in addition they can also submit or vote on shareholder resolutions in order to influence outcomes and we see a lot more of this being done recently so for example you can see here in the slide in this past month actually in March the IDH which is the Sustainable Trade Initiative which started in the Netherlands and it brings together over 600 companies and governments to drive new sustainable production and trade models they hosted a webinar and what happened is that as part of this a group of 45 investors from around the globe with 6.3 trillion euro of assets under management they actually issued an endorsement of IDH's living income and living wage roadmaps so they issued a statement coordinated by Sustainalytics and their endorsement actually calls on companies to develop a roadmap on living income and living wages so you can see all of these investors here and others because these are not all the 45 ones but all of these investors are in support of companies being a lot more involved and committing to living wages and living income which is really positive change in addition there are other important actors in this space so we have share action which is a responsible investment charity here in the UK also acting a bit in Europe and they work on on several good work themes which include living wages specifically also this Monday actually they filed a special resolution for consideration at the AGM of a large UK supermarket retailer regarding living wage accreditation and they coordinated an investor coalition managing 2.2 trillion pounds for this which was really notable because it was actually the first shareholder resolution calling for a listed firm to become a living wage accredited employer and this is specifically important for supermarkets because no supermarkets in the UK have yet to be accredited as living wage employers so hopefully this should lead to some to some positive change and clearly investors are in support of these of these resolutions share action also have a good work coalition which brings together a number of investors that want to improve decent work practices and they have the workforce disclosure initiative which basically encourages companies to better disclose on workforce related matters including including wages and living wages and lastly here on the slide we have the platform living wage financials which was launched in 2018 and it was the first investor coalition on living wages and they are an alliance of 19 financial institutions with over 4.8 trillion euro of assets under management mostly Dutch but also expanding into Europe and they encourage and monitor investing companies to address the non-payment of living wages in global supply chains and platform living wage financials actually takes us to this short case study that we have on Robico which is an asset management firm from the Netherlands very much focused on on sustainable finance and they worked with platform living wage financials in their engagement which started in 2019 on the payment of living wages in the global supply chain of apparel of the apparel industry and they engaged with nine companies in the industry in this process ranging from fast-passion retailers to luxury brands and they focused on three things in their engagement they focused on how companies uphold the payment of living wages across their strategy on how this is supported by responsible purchasing practices and meaningful industry collaborations and also whether they offered remedies when incidents related to wages were identified so they ran this engagement program for three years and they reported seeing positive progress and they successfully closed half about half of their cases and in their active ownership reports at the end of last year they also recognize a challenge in terms of corporate disclosure which is something that we also encountered a lot sort of we were told in our in our interviews that we conducted so not only because of course there is limited disclosure at the moment on wages and especially living wages from corporations but also for brands that participate in for example multi-stakeholder initiatives promoting decent work they actually don't often disclose sort of the outcomes of those engagement of those of their involvement in multi-stakeholder initiatives so there's still some progress to be made but clearly as we can see from the involvement of the entire financial sector and from this example from Robico there is positive progress in this space I will now pass back to Ana. Thanks so much Marina so just to just to finish up we wanted to kind of do two things the first one is to think about the wider context in which living wages should be paid and the reason we're doing this is because as Marina mentioned we've done 31 interviews to try and understand what businesses are doing and what investors are doing and how we're moving towards living wages and one thing that was repeatedly emphasized to us as we were asking is that living wages are much more meaningful when they're paid in a wider context of decent work so living wages they've become very very appealing very easy to understand idea that you pay people the right amount of what they need to live on and it's amazing that companies are moving in this direction and this is really gaining momentum I think if we step back and we think about well what what would work look like with living wages but no other standards of decent work we'd realize that it still would be very problematic so instead we're saying you know living wages are absolutely a kind of core pillar of what decent work means but there's other parts of decent work as well which absolutely have to be upheld including issues like safe work ensuring social protection making sure that workers have legal rights so they have voice and recognition in their roles at work and that they have access to wider things such as education and training infrastructure and services so this is just it's not to detract from the discussion of living wages at all but to say that living wages are like fundamental to this but don't stop there please I think is the overall message and then moving on to the challenges there's some challenges which Maroon has already alluded to maybe next slide this Maroon's already alluded to with a discussion about Fairphone and how they've navigated some of the issues along the way so other things that have come up have been in terms of calculating and measuring living wages this isn't rocket science it's not really difficult it's just a case there's lots of different ways that you can measure it so people who are embarking on that living wage journey need to work out there's a bit of thinking that needs to happen before you can say we are paying living wages because some some research has got to be done some calculations to work out what the living wage rates would be in the in the countries where or the cities where where someone's working I think what's also particularly interesting regarding this is that I think the people who or the companies that are trailblazing now are possibly the ones who've got to do more thinking around this whereas as this becomes more and more normal and more and more established there will be better records regarding what the living wage is in certain locations and it will be much quicker to know what that living wage is and then to implement it I think one thing we learned particularly from Fairphone was the importance of engaging with workers that we saw this challenge faced in terms of you know how do you pay a living wage premium to only a handful of workers within a larger factory meeting lots of different orders from many different companies many of which aren't paying living wages and engaging workers in that case clearly was a very good way of making sure that what by trying to do a good thing you didn't accidentally do a bad thing by increasing competition or creating disputes within the factory context so that was a really really nice kind of example of how that worked well gender is a really interesting one and a couple of our interviewees really highlighted to us that actually there's this implicit assumption that that living wages will be good for women or that it will be good at kind of narrowing that gender pay gap of course increasing someone's wage from being quite low to a bit higher is beneficial the problem comes in when quite a lot of living wage calculations work on the assumption of a more or less full-time working week and what we know about women's work is that women work much much more than a full-time working week but some of that work is unpaid care and domestic work in addition to paid work and because they've got so many hours of work sometimes their paid work gets squeezed to a shorter number of hours which means that by the end of the work they're the working week or the paid working week what they've earned doesn't always amount to what they need to live on that week so it's just a flag to say you know when we when we do make these calculations it's really important to make them gender sensitive and bring in that awareness and that knowledge that we have about the different work patterns that men and women have another thing that we just um worn about is like quite often living wages are framed as a solution to poverty and inequality and they absolutely are a very good way of addressing poverty especially working poverty they're a good way of starting to address inequality but I wouldn't oversell them to say that they're enough to address inequality as a whole because of course inequality is to do the whole spectrum of earnings and wealth it's not just to do with the people at the bottom end so it's good to be important to kind of make sure we have other solutions to inequality alongside that and then there's I think the last thing is just in terms of making sure that work has received the money that they are due to be paid again like a procedural thing shouldn't be too difficult but it's just making sure that it really happens perhaps we could go on to the last slide Marina so Marina and I have produced a few outputs from this project we're really excited that this report The Cases for Living Wages is about to be launched in May 2022 and it's going to be launched in or around the rescheduled Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum and so like do look out on CSL social media channels because we'll be making some noise about it at the time we're also preparing academic paper and if you're interested we did run a webinar during Living Wage Week about investment and decent work in living wages with CSL's sustainable finance group so that may also be of interest to you I think Becca's going to pop a link in the chat for that right now in case you want to follow up and then we also just wanted to point to anyone who is interested in this who wants some more information to some useful resources that we've found there's a huge wealth of different organizations working on this so if you're a tall inspired or if you've already started this journey and you want some support we'd really recommend in particular these three but there's many others as well who are already out there doing the hard work trying to figure out how to make this work and also offering advice to people just getting started I think that just leaves me to say thank you thank you for listening I hope you found us interesting and we really look forward to to your questions thank you very much Hannah and Marina that was great I covered a lot of ground we do have a little bit of time for questions just to sort of just to sort of acknowledge that you did mention this and I think it's very very important that this is a global challenge this could relate to a company based in western Europe with a supply chain into Asia or some other part of the world it could equally apply to a company headquartered in Asia with with a supply chain back into the UK or back into another comparable country this is a global issue and I think we have questions in the area of how does one determine living wage in these different political and cultural and economic contexts you've mentioned organizations like the global global living wage coalition and of course in the UK we have the living wage foundation it does feel to me from what you're saying that you know given especially given the poll that we have multiple definitions whether it's minimum or fair or living and of course major major differences in different parts of the world how should companies begin to fathom what a living wage actually is with some degree of confidence before they embark on establishing levels and hopefully doing something about their pay. That's a great question maybe I'll kick off and then Marina can follow up with some more details. We've only got time for brief answers I'm afraid Hannah. Oh okay we'll be quick then so there's various different methodologies and the anchor methodology is a really well respected methodology and where they really go into a country and do a lot of detailed research. Another thing that is probably really worthwhile doing is engaging with unions who are very interested in pay as well and will have a lot to say on that topic and the consults like if there's a national norm for the country or living in like like Jade mentioned for the UK with the wage foundation they've already done the hard work for you so you can you can adopt that so there's there's different approaches but there's lots of methodologies out there and sometimes it's already been calculated and I honestly think that the more companies that are doing this there'll be a critical mass of information and knowledge and then there'll be it'll be much the more that it gets involved the easier it's going to be so it should ease up in the coming years I'm sure. But it's fair to say isn't it because we have a question around whether governments and policy makers should be taking the initiative here versus more voluntary efforts by companies which are more along the lines that you've you've given us in the case studies that does seem to it's not attention so much but it seems to be a kind of a bit of a missed opportunity. How do you see progress here I mean we've waited a hundred years and we still have a sort of decent level of living wage commitments or practice globally is this really something that needs to be dealt with through regulation or do you see these voluntary efforts and the kind of growing consensus that that this is good for business as well as good for society being sufficient to drive action at the speed which we require. Marina do you want to take that on us today? I can start and then you can add a few events a little bit I think I just have one point we often heard in our interviews from companies and other actors that regulation should play a pretty big part however also when speaking for example to the ILO what we heard is that you know governments do have a pretty difficult job in kind of trying to in a way balance the the sort of asks of workers and also businesses and oftentimes they do ask for kind of opposite sides so often workers will ask for higher wage as well as businesses will try to keep their costs lower and so governments need to sort of balance that and that is why you know they often have minimum wages as opposed to living wages but then often the companies that are pioneers in the field and that wants those higher wages in order to make sure that their workers have a decent standard of living they are asking as well for governments to take that into consideration and they are asking for support and so I think that's in the countries where you know for example such as in the UK where government does support to some extent businesses to to make this change then that is where living wage will advance most quickly and so in my opinion yes governments do have a role to play but it is quite difficult for them and we have to sort of acknowledge that I don't know if you have anything else Anna? Yeah that's great thank you I think I just like thank you Maria I just add that the dream is that the living the minimum wage gets raised up to living wage levels and then and then extended to people to include all workers you know that would be a very a very good way of doing things maybe it's interesting just to note that actually the Nordic countries quite a few of them don't have minimum wages and it's all all their wages are set through negotiation between employers and unions so and you know for them there isn't a low wage problem particularly some of the most equal countries in the world so it's not like minimum wages are the only route to this but I think the issue is just you know how do we get there as quickly as possible and at present minimum wages aren't catching up with living wages quickly enough and this is why there's such a kind of golden opportunity for businesses to really lead the way actually and start taking some of the bold steps which really need to happen because we can see that the cost of not paying living wages is so high in terms of human cost but also in the business cost as well we would do a great job of moving quickly towards many of the sustainable development goals if we could figure this out because it's really holding so many people back. Thanks both that is exciting then to to acknowledge the you know the really substantive opportunity for business to shape the the low pay living wage debate obviously in partnership with other stakeholders such as unions and government but you're you're you've definitely created a space there where you've said this would make a difference and I think that obviously extends to the investors in those companies as well and an investment generally to make sure that you know capital is driving the change process as much as individual business action so thank you for that. I think that the next question surrounds is sort of coming up in different forms and that is where does where does the living wage discussion how is it situated within the broader discussion about you know good jobs or decent work as it sometimes referred to so even within the pay space you know we have a we have a debate about living wage but we also have one about executive pay we also have one about the stratification of pay the highest earners versus the lowest earners in a company or the genie coefficient sometimes used in measurement so there's there's a there's a range of issues around pay living wage is among them but then within the decent workspace we also have things like you know working conditions discrimination at work contract types. How important is this living wage discussion do you think in the the overall social sustainability sphere is it is it one of those kind of leverage points that if we get this right lots of other things come into focus or is it just one of a dozens of issues around this all of which need to be tackled with the same kind of force. Interesting question I'd like to think it is a leverage point actually because like we there's a great sociologist called Goran Thurbon who talks about different types of inequality one is existential inequality so life expectancy which is such a striking measure of inequality because you see some people actually just don't even get to live as long as others and this is really geographically patterns as well. Another type is material inequality so that's your financial and other resources so that's where wages fit in and then the last one is in terms of respect so and we see that they line up so I think when you pay people better often that comes with high levels of respect as well and when you've got high levels of respect maybe you're treated better in the workplace so you know it's it doesn't one doesn't guarantee the other but I would have a strong expectation that when you start treating people better which starts with thinking what does this person need to live on and am I exploiting them by not paying them enough when you start when you when you start changing your way of thinking and thinking about what workers need and living wage is a great place to start with that hopefully that new way of conceptualizing the workers and relating to your workers hopefully has kind of leads to other effects and you do see that some of the worst human rights abuses in the workplace often line up with very low pay so I would think it is a leverage point but you know it's we're quite early in that journey as well so it remains to be seeing what will happen but given given what we've seen elsewhere I think it is a pivotal point. Yes we're sort of a dilemma as we're early in the journey even though it's been a hundred years so far thinking about it it's just incredible. The last question I think we've got we've got time for and this one concerns is living wage a really an issue for larger companies that have the flexibility to think about all of the issues and the business cases behind why they might benefit from adopting living wages versus let's say a small even a micro-sized company that may not feel that it that it has that sufficient financial muscle to invest in that way and you know how do we sort of begin to develop arguments which might suit both the large and the small or the the ones with the flexibility versus the ones who may be you know just establishing themselves and not feel that they're quite there yet. Is this a big organization agenda only? I don't think so I don't think so at all I think it's for everyone but Marina do you want to come in on this? I will just note that we did speak to a small company actually locally in Cambridge in our research as well and I think they actually gave us the most straightforward answer in terms of whether there's a business case or not or how they adopted or their motivation and they just said we just knew we had to do it and we did it and it was quite easy once we knew what the living wage rate was and we just paid everyone a living wage rate and that was it and that was because they don't have you know very complex supply chains they don't the company that we spoke to we they don't have many other contractors or anything they don't have many employees and so they they had to make the finances work but once they knew that they had to do that and in order to become a living wage accredited employer to them it was very straightforward and very easy and then they just adjusted everything else based on that so that they actually provided us with the most simple and straightforward story as opposed to larger companies who did kind of bring or explain a lot of a lot of challenges that they had due to their size. So yeah that's just one one little story from our research. One data point thank you very much Marina. I think I'd like to wrap up now but before I do just to acknowledge that we have several links relating to the topic area in the chat which could provide useful resources for those of you who've participated and also to to invite you again to to take a look at Marina and Anna's report when it's published I think in May at Davos which really is a great summary of some of the issues which we've been covering. Marina just touched on Cambridge a Cambridge company here I sometimes think that you know possibly Cambridge needs a waiting system as well as major major cities like London because actually the cost of living in here and in many parts of the world is just sort of the it's just becoming very much more complicated for people in the current context and I wonder whether those figures which we saw during the poll might quite you know increase quite radically over the next few years as a to accommodate the inflation energy price rises and lots of instabilities and volatilities in the economy right right around the world. So clearly this is a this is a this is a moving debate which is sometimes why it's I think quite hard for companies to to plan ahead and understand quite what the implications are but certainly certainly that was food for thought so I'd like to thank you Anna and Marina for the presentation really glad you've been able to do that I'd like to thank Unilever for the for its generous support of the of the fellowship program and of course thank you all for participating today it's great to have you as part of these as part of this series great to have your questions and although we conclude this round of four webinars based around our research program we are very likely to do more in future and I hope you can participate in some oral of those and lastly I'd like to thank two people who haven't been thanked sufficiently during the process and that's that's Rebecca and Gianna who have been masterminding the this webinar series that done an enormous round of work behind the scenes to get them into this shape so thanks very much for all your efforts on that and I'll say goodbye and thank you once again for your participation thank you goodbye thank you


you see this bike? I love it but I'm giving it away. I bought this beautiful machine back in the summer of 2016 when my old Trek 8000 finally gave up and broke in half. oh crap that is not normal that there that there is a broken bicycle. that's when I got this bike the Trek 920. I essentially needed a new workhorse bicycle. I needed a new adventure bike, a bike that I could go on bike tours with but also go grocery shopping with and that's what this machine was. later that same summer I rode this bad boy from Boulder to Burning Man out in Nevada and it was about a thousand mile adventure. we went through Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada and this bike was solid as a rock. I love you world! you hear that? I love you! I love this bike. it's fast on the roads. you can take it off-road. it's comfortable. I even like the cool color. it looks like something you'd find in an aisle of like Whole Foods or something. it's got that organic look to it. but the truth is I really haven't been riding this bike much in the last nine months. you see back in June of 2018 I got a Trek checkpoint and I rode that bicycle across the country with my girlfriend Ali and you all know about that beautiful story and the Trek checkpoint is pretty similar to the 920. it's not quite as beefy as this bike but it's a similar ride and I've been riding the checkpoint a lot more than this one. so this one has sadly been sitting in my garage. and then I got a message just this past week from a friend that I made last summer and this is what the message says. hey Ryan, I was wondering if I could maybe ask for a little bit of help. I'm getting ready for this riding season and I've been saving to buy a good bicycle. one that I believe will meet all of my needs. I don't know if you remember but I was having quite a bit of trouble mechanically last year on rag bride. I want to get a Trek 920. I have some money but I'm not sure I will have even enough to buy a good used one by the time I head out on my first trip this spring. is there anyone you know at trek who could maybe assist me? some of you might be putting this together people who follow the love cycles adventure and specifically rag bride but this message is from that awesome guy luke that I met that one morning. he stopped me and told me all about how cycling changed his life and how he lost over 200 pounds and how motivated he is now to ride bikes.  I was 544 pounds and I developed AFib and so now it ripped me in my heartbeat and I left there that day and I started a diet and I set goals for myself and I lost 44 pounds in the first month and 74 pounds by the end of the second month and then I started swimming for a little while but then I got on a bike and I started riding and that's where I found you on on youtube because I was just constantly youtubeing different stuff trying to learn about it and just your positive nature and how positive you were about everything and I realized like I developed kind of a funk where I was real pessimist and I was constantly really negative and I thought I need to be like that guy I need to constantly just be smiling and happy and learn how to be that kind of excited and I think it'll be part of it has to do with the fact that you ride a bike everywhere and you're just you're more in touch with I mean the world with life we just had a baby I mean that's a huge part of all this for me because my baby like here I'll show you a picture man yeah let's do it I don't want to get to a point where like when I'm 45 or 50 or something they're like I can't do this kind of stuff with her I want to be able to take her on these adventures and go do cool stuff with her and you know I have this dream that someday maybe me and my wife be able to go on bike trips and you know I could have the baby at some point one of those little trailers and then eventually maybe on one of those little those little piggyback bikes that hangs off the back or whatever and then eventually there's my kid riding right alongside me and hopefully my kid never knows what it's like to be obese I was morbidly obese and a big part of it was because we just growing up like you know my parents and carters just go outside and play in everything but I just was never really an active child and so I want to try to encourage my daughter to be as active as possible and get out and see the world and just do cool stuff. Meeting Luke was very impactful this guy's story is incredible and I saw him throughout the week at Radbrie and he was having a great time but it was really hard for him he had never done anything like this in his life and Radbrie you ride you know anywhere from 50 to 70 miles a day it's it's hard and he was riding a very cheap bike that kept on braking and he was telling me about every night he was going to the mechanic with busted spokes and wheels and you know I felt for the guy because it's like why you want him to have this great experience but he's also riding a machine that's not really up to the adventure you know his bike was like a probably a hundred and fifty dollar Walmart bike that's just not a touring bike. Luke and I have been in touch since Radbrie we're friends on Facebook we chat back and forth and when I got his message this week I really wanted to help but I didn't know quite what I could do because the truth is my contact at Trek isn't there anymore so I don't really have a connection to get deals but you know what I do have I do have a Trek 920 and I was like dude I'll just give you my Trek 920 how does that sound so here it is Luke come and get it just kidding buddy I know that you live in Illinois I will pack this up and send it your way it fills my heart with joy knowing that this Trek 920 this beautiful machine is going to have a new life with Luke it's been sadly sitting in storage for the past nine months and that is no place for a bicycle to be this bicycle needs to be free and I know that Luke and this bike are going to go on many adventures together when I told Luke that I would give him this bike straight up he was overwhelmed and he said well what what can I do and I said well you said that you had saved up some money for a new bike why don't you donate that money to some sort of organization that you truly believe in and he said awesome and you know the more that I sit here and I stand and I'm talking about Luke I think why don't we just let's just call Luke what's up Luke can you see me yet I cannot see you yet oh there we go let's see oh there yes oh look who it is duty handstand duty handstand hi so are you psyched or what about this bike oh my god I'm beyond psyched about this but I didn't even think it happened I'm gonna tell you man like when when you sent me that message and said that you wanted to give me your bike I started crying I've never been able to afford a bike that was like a real good quality bike and it's always kind of been a dream that you know if I could get into this enough I could save up enough and if I do enough of these trips then I feel like I could justify spending that kind of money on that bike because you gotta understand I mean it's been the kind of money on a car yeah yeah exactly but all of it led up to this lifestyle that now that I wake up in the morning and I and I just I look forward to my daily bike right I look forward to what's coming this summer I look forward to what might be next year I look forward to the adventures to come so you mentioned you saved up a little bit of money that you would have spent on this bike and now maybe you can donate some of that talk about that uh the nonprofit that you love working with the American Heart Association has been working for all of us we have a juvenile obesity problem in this country I was a fat kid I have no better way to play yeah and there's so many of our kids out there that are extremely obese and you know if a child becomes obese as a child they have an 80% likelihood of being an obese adult I kind of feel like you know I got a hard problem because I allowed myself to become so incredibly obese and I think it's just largely because I just didn't I didn't really know any better until it was a problem yeah the American Heart Association is the only organization I've seen that is making that much of an effort to make children aware the importance of diet and exercise before it becomes a problem for them thank you very much man I can't tell you thank you I'm not we have a wonderful night get back to your beautiful girls and uh yeah we'll be in touch dude thank you all right see you bud wow what a guy the connection wasn't great but man he is he's not only helping himself out they becoming a healthier human he's spreading it to everybody he meets and uh he's doing a lot of good in the world I couldn't think of a better guy for this bike so Luke enjoy it my friend cheers we got Luke on the right side we got Ali on the left side


Good morning, John.  That's a lot to take on, and I'll be honest for a long time. I felt like maybe you were trying a little too hard and like it wasn't gonna happen. But somehow, hitting me with ASU Ember to News every week, even when the news has been very bad, has started to get to me. I guess I'm on this journey with you now. And you've been on a bunch of journeys with me as well, so thanks for that. And I'd like to maybe take you on another one. So far in this video, I've just been showing you a bunch of quite boring things, mostly like parts of trees. But I'm gonna bust out my handy jeweler's loop here, which is designed to inspect jewelry, but can help you inspect pretty much anything and see that each of these trees and rocks are actually studded with a bizarre crusting of life. You probably first heard the word symbiosis when you were in fourth or fifth grade, but no one had ever heard it until 1877 when Albert Bernard Frank decided we needed a word for something that at that time, many people did not believe even existed. Now when people started to look at lichen under the microscope, it looked mostly like a bunch of algae. And this wasn't really a mystery. People weren't thinking, what is lichen? They were looking at lichen and thinking, that is like a moss or a fern or a grass or a tree. It's just another kind of plant. But in the 1860s, like 10 years before Alfred Bernard Frank coined the term symbiosis, Swiss botanist Simon Schvendner looked at lichen, and he saw among the algae pretty transparent structures that were to him pretty transparently fungus parts. He started to tell people about this and people did not agree. We as humans argued for a very long time about this because this was the first organism that did not appear to be only itself. Neither the fungus nor the algae could live apart, but together they became something that was neither fungus nor algae. This is kind of normal for us today, but like the explosion of information that came with the invention of the microscope shattered so many of our understandings of our world and of life on it. They weren't just something else, they were an entirely new kind of organism, a whole new way of existing. And now we understand that so many things, including our own bodies, exist symbiotically. All while that word itself is less than 150 years old, we are surrounded by infant knowledge that we think has been around forever. Most days when I walk down a path in the forest, I'm barely even looking at the trees. I'm mostly thinking about work or worrying about the planet or the people on it or just singing a song in my head, but sometimes you look at the trees and sometimes you look deeper and now we can dive into what is invisible to our eyes.  On every one of those trees is a whole little world that the moment we polished glass carefully enough, we realized broke so many of the rules we thought we knew. It's always there, but for so long, totally invisible to us. Just doing what works, because that's what works. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. Also, we just released an episode of Journey to the Microcosmos about lichen that inspired this episode. If you wanna go deeper on the history and beauty of lichens, it's there waiting for you and in the description. Also, if you wanna start on your own journey, we have worked with our master of microscope to create the perfect starter microscope, which starts at $350 and it's available at microcosmos.store, where there's also a bunch of other cool stuff.