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Beyond Compliance: How ASC is Embedding Living Wage in Aquaculture Certification
September 12, 2025
In our previous blog of this series, we introduced the concept of living wage and explored why it is vital for sustainable seafood. Now, we turn to how ASC is moving from theory to practice by integrating living wage principles into the ASC Farm Standard.
Over the years, ASC has led the way in social performance: preventing child labour and forced labour, enforcing safe workplaces and upholding freedom of association on ASC certified farms. With many farms operating where legal minimum wages don’t cover basic needs, we recognise that protecting worker rights also means guaranteeing wages that meet real living costs.
Embedding living wage into the ASC Farm Standard is a natural progression—reflecting rising expectations from buyers, investors, and consumers—and reinforcing the resilience of ASC certified supply chains.
By introducing living wage requirements, we aim to guide farms toward practical, phased improvements in pay. This isn’t about closing the gap overnight; it’s about offering clear benchmarks, and support so that producers and buyers can work together to close the gap between today’s wages and what workers and their families truly need to thrive.
What this Means for Farms, Buyers, and Partners
The payment of living wages cannot be achieved by farms alone. It requires a collective and coordinated effort across the value chain; from producers and buyers to certification schemes and civil society. ASC plays a unique and connecting role in this effort: setting clear expectations, providing practical tools and creating the conditions for collaboration.
- For producers, ASC brings structure and support to what can otherwise feel like an overwhelming topic. Producers receive support to gain visibility into current wage gaps and to develop and track wage improvement plans. This helps producers understand where they stand, where they need to go, and how to get there – with flexibility to reflect their specific realities. This creates a safer space for producers to engage honestly and meaningfully on challenges and opportunities around wage improvements.
- For buyers and retailers, the ASC Farm Standard creates a credible and consistent way to engage on living wage and offers assurance on wage gap data. Our certification programme also provides a credible mechanism to engage in responsible purchasing towards closing living wage gaps.
- For NGOs, unions, and technical partners, ASC offers a platform for impact at scale. Our living wage framework creates opportunities for collaboration on local implementation strategies and capacity building. Through shared learning and partnerships, we can improve both the tools and the outcomes by tailoring living wage efforts to regional contexts while keeping global alignment.
- For consumers, the ASC label offers reassurance that there is a strong focus on ensuring that workers are paid fairly and that moving towards a living wage is a priority for the farms producing the seafood that they are buying.
By acting as a bridge between these stakeholders, ASC is committed to help turn good intentions into coordinated, real-world change. By creating clarity and transparency about living wages we help to create the dialogue that is needed to achieve payment of a living wage in the aquaculture sector.
A Phased, Contextual Strategy
Seafood farming operations vary widely. From small shrimp ponds in southeast Asia to large salmon operations in Europe and everything in between, each have their unique economic, cultural and ecological realities.
This diversity means that the path towards living wage also differs by region and species. Asking every ASC certified farm to immediately pay a full living wage would be neither fair nor feasible.
Instead, the ASC Farm Standard emphasises wage measurement, transparency and goal setting to gradually move the industry towards paying a living wage. This begins with helping farms to compare their current wages with locally relevant living wage benchmarks using tools like the IDH Salary Matrix.
This step gives producers a clear baseline and informs practical targets without penalising those just starting their journey. It also gives ASC insight into living wage gaps in various contexts, which informs projects and priorities.
Based on the wage assessment, each farm drafts a multi-year wage improvement plan tailored to its circumstances. These roadmaps respect each farm’s financial realities, seasonality, and species-specific economics, setting realistic milestones and timelines.
Rather than treating living wage as a rigid requirement, we view it as a shared target—one that producers, buyers, and other stakeholders work towards together, making incremental progress that balances social ambition with operational viability.
Living Wage Requirements in the ASC Farm Standard
- Identify: The farm shall annually calculate employee remuneration and assess this against the living wage benchmarks listed on the ASC website to identify if there is a gap between employee remuneration and the living wage benchmark.
- Report: The farm shall annually report on the gap between employee remuneration and the living wage benchmark, according to ASC data submission procedures.
- Plan: The farm shall, where employee remuneration is below the living wage benchmark, develop and implement a wage improvement plan towards payment of a living wage.
Our goal is a decent wage for every worker on ASC certified farms. We envision a certification system that aims to deliver real improvements in the daily lives of workers, their families, and their communities.
Our Long‑Term Vision
Living wages are a complex challenge, but they are essential to building truly sustainable seafood. No single actor can solve this alone, and success requires full supply chain collaboration. We are integrating living wages into our certification and building partnerships that turn ambition into action, and we call for others to join the effort in making decent pay a reality for everyone in aquaculture.
In our next blog, we will explore the practical realities of implementing living wages on the ground—examining the tools, data systems and collaboration models that can make fair pay a reality rather than an aspiration.
Interested in collaborating on living wage solutions? Contact our human rights team to learn how you can contribute to fairer, more resilient aquaculture supply chains.
