Just Label

Mission goals:

Commit to transparent operations

Foster a cooperative working environment that supports the personal and professional goals of our employees

Increase the accessibility and inclusiveness of the trades to diverse and traditionally excluded communities

Part of MPH's mission is to proactively address social equity issues and provide a fulfilling work environment to each of our employees. As a commitment to this goal, we use a framework provided by the International Living Future Institute called the Just Program to evaluate our progress.

The Just Program is a transparency scorecard f0r organizations to voluntary disclose a third party review of their operations, including how they treat their employees and where they make financial and community investments.

This platform assists organizations in optimizing policies that improve social equity and enhance employee engagement.

By applying for & renewing the Just label, we are able to take an in depth look at our operations.

The label is not a badge of achievement. Rather, a roadmap to improvement.

Our label is an open and honest assessment of where our company currently stands and a public commitment to improve.

2024 Review changes:

Improvements:

  • We included health care as a benefit to our employees shortly after the first Just label review (2022)

  • We increased our training budget ($1000)

  • We increased the number of hours available to employees for volunteering (16hrs)

Clarifications/losses/shifts:

  • Gender pay equity - The scoring data can really be thrown off when you have a small company. For example, the second year shows pay equity as decreasing. This is only because some job categories no longer had enough people in them to measure equity (must have more than 4 people in one category for comparison).

  • Charitable giving - even though we commit to setting aside 1% of gross sales for community contributions (which is level 4), we opt to give 75% of that as labor. LFI stipulates that 75% would have to be cash in order to achieve level 4. We feel our donations can have a greater impact as skilled labor, placed appropriately & donated locally. We may reassess this in the future.

  • Retirement provision - although we have a 3% IRA match, we do not mandate our employees sign up. ILFI requires employees be auto enrolled in retirement plans for level 2.

2021 Review highlights

This was the first year we conducted the review, so we used the process to create and codify policies that maybe weren’t in place before. A few highlights:

  • We created a paid maternal and paternal policy

  • We realized we wanted to provide healthcare & started working on finding a policy that could work for our company

  • We clarified & increased our training stipend

  • We wrote our charitable giving policy

Elements shaded in grey we opted out of reviewing/ or did not posses the ability to score

Why take this on as a business, you might ask? We are all part of a society and an economy that actively marginalizes large groups of people and profits off of land grabs, systemic racism, and inequality. If we are not working to improve this, we feel we are complicit with the problem. As a company, we have influence in what we choose to purchase, what we choose to build, and how we treat the workers who make it all happen.