With a statutory minimum wage frozen at GEL 20 since 1999, a quarter of employed Georgians earn below subsistence level.
In 2024, approximately 24 percent of employed people in Georgia earned incomes below the national subsistence minimum — a threshold currently set at approximately GEL 260 per month for an adult. This phenomenon, working poverty, is distinct from unemployment and from extreme poverty. It describes individuals who are formally in employment but whose wages are insufficient to meet basic needs. It is, in this sense, a failure not of the labour market’s ability to create jobs, but of the labour market’s ability to make employment worthwhile.
The statutory minimum wage in Georgia stands at GEL 20 per month — a figure last updated in 1999 and unchanged for a quarter of a century. It is, by any reasonable measure, a non-binding floor. No employer in Georgia would attempt to hire at GEL 20 per month; the market wage in virtually every sector exceeds this figure substantially. But the symbolic and legal irrelevance of the minimum wage has a direct practical consequence: Georgia has no mechanism through which the state signals a minimum threshold of labour dignity, no tool through which collective bargaining can anchor upward wage pressure, and no baseline against which working poverty can be formally defined and tracked.
The ILO’s Convention C131 on minimum wage fixing, which Georgia has ratified, requires that minimum wage levels take into account the needs of workers and their families, economic factors, and productivity. A GEL 20 floor violates not just the spirit of this convention but its explicit requirements. The ILO’s Decent Work Country Programme for Georgia 2024–2026 identifies minimum wage reform as a priority, but no legislative action has followed.
What does working poverty look like in practice? It is concentrated in agriculture, where informality is highest and wages lowest. It is disproportionately female — women are overrepresented in the care and service sectors where part-time and informal employment is most common. It is heavily rural: workers in Kakheti, Samegrelo, and Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti face wage levels 40–60 percent below those in Tbilisi, with comparable costs of living for food, utilities, and housing in some commodities.
The working poor in Georgia are often formally invisible. Because they are employed, they do not appear in unemployment statistics. Because they earn something — even if that something is insufficient — they are not captured by extreme poverty monitoring frameworks. They fall between the categories that policy systems are designed to recognise.
GILS Position: GILS recommends that Georgia undertake an immediate statutory minimum wage review, benchmarked to 50 percent of median earnings — the threshold used by the ILO and the EU Adequate Minimum Wages Directive as a reasonable minimum standard. Based on 2024 Geostat data, this would place the minimum wage at approximately GEL 700–750 per month, consistent with the GEL 700+ figure that several business associations, including AmCham Georgia, have publicly supported.
Such a reform requires accompanying measures. The Tripartite Commission should be empowered to conduct a formal minimum wage review on an annual basis, as required by C131, with a transparent methodology that weighs worker need, productivity data, and employment impact modelling. The Labour Inspection Service must have capacity to enforce the new floor, particularly in agriculture and domestic work where evasion is currently universal.
Georgia’s EU candidacy creates a specific policy window. The EU Adequate Minimum Wages Directive, which requires candidate countries to demonstrate progress toward 50 percent of median earnings, gives the government a concrete external reference point. Using the EU accession process to drive minimum wage reform is not an imposition of external standards — it is an alignment of domestic policy with commitments already made.
Working poverty is not an inevitable feature of transition economies. Estonia eliminated it. Poland has reduced it dramatically. The mechanism is not mysterious: it requires a statutory floor, enforced, updated regularly, and embedded in a functioning system of social dialogue. Georgia has the legal architecture. It lacks only the political commitment to use it.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/working-poverty-georgia/