Our sourcing strategy

The impact of extreme inflation in Turkey

In Belgium, inflation increased significantly in 2022, but in Turkey inflation reached extreme levels like never seen before. The weak Turkish lira translated into extremely high inflation because imports of energy, food products and semi-finished goods for industry became more expensive. This situation affected the living costs of our workers in Turkey, so several wage increases have been implemented. Inflation is reflected in the living wage.

Our living wage project

We continued our dialogue with the management of Bella Tekstil-Tekumut on living wages. In 2020, we started to create more transparency in the wages of the different worker categories and we had a first insight in pay slips. Now, we have regular meetings, live or by Microsoft Teams, to follow up on the wages, especially in the context of the Turkish inflation situation. The management of Tekumut is anticipating all the time to the current economic situation and offers further transparency. We have a good and updated overview of the evolution of net-brut wages, financial bonuses, transport and food bonuses offered to the workers.

A first wage increase of 60% was realized in February 2022, a second one in

July 2022 of 30%. In 2022 extreme high inflation was measured in Turkey. This resulted in a total wage increase of 136% for our workers between Jan. 2022 and Jan. 2023. We could see that the local living wages in Duzce have increased with 133%. Despite the difficult situation, the ambition to pay viable wages remained. We compared the actual wages of the workers with the local living wage based on the living cost in Duzce.

As Duzce is a rural province we could determine that living cost is 27.5% lower than the average living cost in Turkey.

As living cost is used to estimate living wage it means that Duzce local living wage is 27.5% of the average Turkish living wage spearheaded by Turk-is, the national trade union.