the campaign in 2008

SOAS is set to become the next Living Wage university. It has now agreed to pay the London LW to all its outsourced contracted workers.

Elsewhere the London LW campaign is continuing to focus its efforts on the hotel and catering sector. In December 2007 the Hilton Group announced that all in house staff across 17 hotels would be paid a LW in 2008. Harrison Catering Services have since signed up to the London LW. Prior to the mayoral elections, Boris Johnson joined with the three other leading candidates in commiting themselves to promote the London LW, and all four also adopted a proposal that only hotels and restaurants who were living wage employers would be promoted by Visit London and tourist guides ahead of the Olympics.

Outside of London, LW campaigners are still celebrating the decision of Oxford city council to put its lowest paid employees on a living wage of £7 an hour from April 2009. This has raised hopes that other major employers such as Oxford University can be persuaded to follow suit.

The Scottish LW campaign has now gone public. It’s trying to get as broad as possible a range of people and organisations on board, and will be convening an event in Glasgow in the autumn.

 

Living Wage in 2008

Following the council motion reported in my last post, the Oxford LW campaign have stepped up a gear, starting to raise awareness of this among workers and students, while working with the City Council and trade unions to agree on implementation measures. Once an Oxford LW figure has been set, pressure will be directed at the university to follow the council’s lead.

The London LW campaign achieved a number of successes in 2007, thanks to which the proportion of the national cleaning workforce on the living wage increased from 4 to 9% over the past 12 months. Organiser Matthew Bolton says that “the next big sector to crack is the hotel sector. There’s a massive problem of low pay, even across the big luxury chains. Some staff are paid a piece rate of £2.50 a room, which can mean they don’t even make the minimum wage.”

Peter Kenyon of the London Labour Party reports that one of their main objectives for 2008 is a living wage for Corporation of London employees.

And finally in Scotland a broadbased coalition is coming together to campaign for a living wage, which involves the Poverty Alliance, the STUC, churches and charity organisations. 

 

Oxford city council

Oxford council have voted in favour of a motion proposed by Labour Party and Green councillors which commits the council to “achieving Living Wage Employer status by April 2009″ and resolves to “work with living wage campaigners, low paid workers, trade unions and employers to make Oxford a ‘Living Wage City’ in which every worker earns a living wage”. Read the full text of the motion here.

 

a new living wage toolkit

The TUC have produced a new LW toolkit ‘the London living wage : a working guide for trade unions’. You can download it from here. It’s an excellent resource. It sets out the case for the London Living Wage; it has information about how it has been implemented and which companies have adopted it; it gives an example of best practice; and it includes an action checklist for LW campaigners.

 

when criminals go unpunished

We have just seen the first successful prosecution of an employer under the National Minimum Wage legislation. That’s one prosecution in nearly 10 years. But wait, it gets worse. The owner of Rascals Day Nursery in Walthamstow was fined just £2,500 for her deliberate non-cooperation with investigators. Miserable though this penalty may seem, the maximum fine employers can face is just £5,000. In practice, it is ludicrously easy for employers to avoid any prosection at all. 95 per cent of employers caught underpaying the minimum wage simply pay back what they owe to avoid any further penalty. If they fail to do this within a 4 week period, they can be landed with a fixed penalty notice (about £225 per worker).

If the government seems inept at flushing out those employers who pay starvation wages, it is because the resources devoted to finding them are totally inadequate. Earlier this year the government announced proudly that the budget to enforce minimum wage laws was to increase by 50%. Unfortunately this was just an increase from £6m to £9m - scarcely enough to cover the office furnishings of some government departments. I read that the government is doing a mail out to hotel employers this month, informing them about minimum wage rules and things they need to be doing. After a short ‘bedding in’ period this will be followed up by spot checks from enfocrement officers. I just have one question : isn’t ten years a long enough bedding in period for employers to comply with the law ?

 

so what next ?

My Living Wage petition has now closed with 1,272 signatures. A link to the government’s response will be published here when it appears.

I’m grateful to everyone who’s given their support. I’d like to think that a good number of you learned a little more at the same time about campaigns for a living wage (I’ve learned a hell of a lot !). This website has had 1,000 hits since it started a few months ago. I will continue to update it, but what it will look like in three years time I have no idea. This part is up to you. If new LW campaigns spring to life in other regions, and the numbers of activities - and victories - start to multiply, then the form and culture of this website could be radically reshaped.

Meanwhile, here are a few suggestions of things that you can do now :

Find out more about LW campaigns - their history, their aims, their methods of organisation.

If you live in London or another city with an active campaign, join it ! Become an organiser !

If there’s no active campaign near you, maybe it’s time to start one. Speak to other LW campaigners about what you can do, or drop me an email - I may be in contact with other people in your area.

Find out whether your trade union, political group, church or NGO has a policy on LW campaigns. Then discuss with LW campaigners about how the policy can be improved. A good policy would include a clear definition of what a living wage is, would pledge support to campaigns for a living wage, and would commit to working with other organisations to developing a set of common demands toward a national living wage.

 

What SHOULD people earn ?

YouGov asked 3,000 people this question in a recent poll for the Fabian Society. Here’s what the British public thought were reasonable salaries :

• Prime minister - £135,000
• MD of a top company - £120,000
• A GP - £70,000
• A leading Premiership footballer - £62,000
• A state secondary school headteacher - £52,000
• An experienced hospital nurse - £33,000
• A local beat police officer - £29,500
• A good local plumber - £28,500
• A bus driver - £22,500
• A supermarket check-out worker - £15,000
• A fast-food restaurant worker - £14,000.

This shows the strength of the belief that people should be paid a fair wage for the work that they do. The recently reported massive increases in top executives pay underlines the huge inequities that exist in British society. Surely there must be more fair and reasonable ways of determining salaries than the madness of the marketplace ?

 

On unity

Many organisations have expressed support for a living wage. But what should a living wage be, and who should get to decide this ? Understandably, there are many different views on this. But this doesn’t have to mean that we can’t all work together for a common goal. So how can the campaign remain unified ?

I think Jon Cruddas had it right during the Labour deputy leadership campaign when he said not just that he supported a living wage to end poverty pay, but also that he supported living wage campaigns. If you’re drawing up a motion to a trade union or other organisation, make sure that you call on them to work with and support any active LW campaigns, and to support their demands. These demands will include working conditions such as holiday entitlements, trade union recognition, parity between contract workers and public sector workers doing the same job. They will also include a living wage that has been researched, is authoritative, and is based on a formula which has been agreed on by the campaign. There will always be valid arguments why the figure should be higher. But the most important thing is to have one figure around which the whole movement can unite, and which will be an effective basis for campaigns and pay negotiations. The greater the unity that there is around this, the greater the credibility that the living wage will have, and the stronger the basis for campaigning.

Unity doesn’t mean surrendering your principles. The LW campaign is a broad church, and a local campaign may involve groups with quite different agendas. The character of the local campaign is likely to reflect the politics and the agendas of the people and groups involved. They may well have debates from time to time over tactical turns. Decisions will be made which some may find disappointing. None of this is (or should be) a recipe for division - these are characteristics of a healthy democratic network which is happy to work together toward its agreed objectives.

This unity can be deepened and strengthened by LW campaigners maintaining strong links with other campaigns that share similar values and goals such as CAP’s Living Ghosts Campaign; national industrial action by the PCS and the CWU; and the Unite demonstration outside the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth on September 23rd.

 

1,000 up

The living wage petition reached 1,000 signatures early this morning. It feels good to get there ! Many more people have written to me to express their support. The signatories represent many regions and many sectors of the community.

I think the petition has achieved something already : many more people are now aware of the living wage campaign, and the breadth and strength of support for a living wage is there for everyone to see. But this will mean nothing unless activists go out and fight to bring about a living wage. If you live in London, you can do this by joining the London Citizens campaign. If you’re outside London, then unless there’s already a group set up in your town or area, why not discuss with a few people about setting up a local LW campaign. It’s crucial that people do this if the campaign is to move forward.

A quick word of thanks to a few of the bloggers who’ve published links to the petition and/or this website : Philip Booth, Adam Johannes, Tom Miller, Chris Paul, Dave Renton, and Paul Smith. Nice one guys !

 

Why Gordon Brown should pay the nursery nurses

One of the objectives of a living wage campaign must be to secure equal pay for equal work. This means raising the question not just what is a living wage; but what is a fair wage for the work that you do. A fair wage in Glasgow should look the same as a fair wage in Manchester for people doing the same work.

In many jobs there are huge differences in salary depending not only on whether you are employed by the local authority or the private sector, but also on which local authority you happen to work for. This was a major point of contention in the Scottish nursery nurses strike of 2004.

Since 1997 Labour has overseen an expansion of the childcare sector, stimulated by initiatives such as Sure Start, the Child Care Strategy and education funding for three and four year olds. For some time nurses had been arguing that their job had been changing as greater demands were placed on them as a result of government policy, producing more reports, and playing a larger role in children’s education. This had not been matched by improvements in working conditions or in rates of pay. The demand for higher pay led 5,000 mostly female nursery nurses employed by local authorities across Scotland to go on strike for several weeks. The government’s response was to say that it was down to the unions to negotiate settlements with each local authority. Infuriating though this was to the nurses, in the end they were left with pay offers that differed widely between councils, with a gap as far apart as £8.76 and £10.46 per hour in some cases.

The regional differentials remain (a basic grade nursery nurse’s pay can vary by up to £3,000 a year depending on where she lives), though the struggle to earn a living wage is at its most acute in the private sector, where most employers pay nursery assistants the minimum wage and struggle to maintain differentials between nurses and assistants. Salaries now account for up to 80% of nursery turnover, and increases in salary are likely to be passed on in the form of price increases to parents. As it continues to enact policies which will give rise to further expansion of childcare, the Labour government can’t evade its responsibilities to the workers who will implement these policies. Giving staff greater pay and status will reduce staff turnover and improve the quality of childcare. Legislation should be passed to set a living wage for nursery nurses, and the government should make extra funds available to providers to pay for this, so that the increase isn’t simply passed on to parents.