Thought for the Week: Why I support a Living Wage
As the first Living Wage Week approaches, Sarah Holtam considers the issue of working poverty
This Sunday sees the start of the first Living Wage Week. The Living Wage campaign highlights fair pay as an urgent moral and practical necessity to eradicate poverty. It identifies that the minimum wage does not afford an adequate quality of life to people forced to work two or even three jobs in order to support their families. The Guardian reported this week that one in five British workers (nearly five million people) live in working poverty.
The Living Wage is an hourly rate, set independently, every year. It is calculated according to cost of living and gives the minimum rate required for a worker to provide their family with the essentials. In London this stands at £8.30 per hour, and £7.20 outside. The national minimum wage has just been raised to £6.19.
Anything less than the Living Wage keeps people in working poverty, widens the gap of inequality and leaves people dependant on all manner of additional benefits – more people than ever are relying on handouts from food banks according to The Trussell Trust.
Better pay benefits everyone and leads to a more equitable future. Launched in 2001, the campaign has won nearly £100 million in additional wages for 10,000 low paid workers. Employers from banks to borough councils report sizeable benefits that significantly offset any additional cost. As well as improvements to company reputation, studies show increased efficiency, retention, productivity and markedly reduced absenteeism.
The campaign is led by Citizens: UK, an alliance bringing together local community groups – often faith based, as well as educational institutions, ethnic minorities and trade unions – with the purposes of empowering using nonconfrontational means. London West, North West London and Milton Keynes Area Meetings are all members of their respective local Citizens groups, and have engaged in a range of social justice campaigns.
Julia Unwin of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation will announce the Living Wage figure for 2012/13 in York this week and a variety of events will be held across the UK to celebrate, promote and put the case for more organisations to join the campaign. With multi-party backing from politicians and increasing support from both private and public sector, this campaign is growing, winning one company at a time.
As Quakers, we aim to treat people fairly and like to think of ourselves as good employers. Westminster Meeting is proud to pay our cleaner above the Living Wage; he works isolating, antisocial hours and leaves our building sparkling each day. Friends House maintains a radical pay ratio of 4:1, that is – no one earns more than four times the lowest wage.
As with Quaker faith & practice, the strength of the Living Wage lies in its humanity. It’s about real people through testimonies and life experience. Sir John Bond, the former executive chairman of HSBC, was left speechless when his cleaner Abdul Durrant stood at an AGM and said, ‘We work in the same office, but we live in different worlds.’
Even John Lewis, one of the UK’s most principled employers, who outsourced services twenty years ago are now considering bringing some contracted staff back into the partnership. At a recent event about the John Lewis model of partnership, we heard an account of a cleaner feeling ‘like a rat in a palace’, invisibly scurrying around at night. Abraham, a Nigerian, British-trained lawyer who’s lived in Britain for more than three decades, supervises twenty cleaners in one store but receives just £6.08 an hour.
Outsourcing was once seen to be the solution for efficient business, now it risks exploitation.
At a time of crippling cuts to services, I’m all for Living Wage Week and hope it might be one step closer to ‘the world as it should be’.
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