Home » Posts tagged 'Living Wage'
Tag Archives: Living Wage
Two election promises, more smoke and mirrors
An envelope drops through my letter-box and I start a blog. I haven’t blogged for a while. I’m in political hibernation. I’m depressed by politics. I’m particularly depressed by the general election pantomime. So I haven’t blogged.
In this morning’s envelope is the election edition of the Unite union’s magazine Unite Works. On the first page the union’s General Secretary, Len McCluskey, tells me “Seize this day. Vote Labour”. Then the rest of the magazine tells me about Labour’s election promises, including quotes by the Labour leader Ed Miliband.
One of them is about “fair wages” and, in part, the legal minimum wage. The national minimum wage is currently £6.50 an hour and Ed’s promise is to “raise the minimum wage to £8 an hour before 2020”. (I immediately wonder why we should have to wait up to 5 years, but anyway …)
Neither of these could be described as a living wage. And that brings me to the second Miliband promise. He will, he says, “encourage more employers to pay the Living Wage”. (I immediately wonder why he says “encourage”, not “oblige” or “compel” or “force”.)
Anyway, note the capital letters. The Living Wage is not to be confused with a real living wage. With capital letters it is the wage set by the Living Wage Foundation (LWF), and employers need to pay that wage if their aim is to get on LWF’s list of nice employers. It is, of course, a voluntary scheme. The LWF’s rate at the moment is £7.85 an hour. Once again, lots of people on hourly rates don’t work anything like a full week or even a full day. Even if they did, this is not a living wage.
The calculations to establish the level of the Living Wage are made by the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP), funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Decisions are made on “how much income households need to afford an acceptable standard of living” – that is, on a calculation of the so-called Minimum Income Standard for the United Kingdom. These decisions, says LWF, “are made by groups comprising members of the public”. Unfortunately, I have not managed to identify who these “members of the public” are. It must be a secret. It is certainly not clear whether they include people who are on the minimum wage – people, that is, who know from experience what is “acceptable” and what is not.
Anyway, if we take the current national minimum wage, the current Living Wage and Labour’s proposed national minimum wage (if we’re lucky, some time in the next 5 years) – none of them amounts in fact to a real living wage.
No change, then.
Now for another promise: Ed also claims: “We will ban exploitative zero hours contracts to ensure workers who work regular hours get a regular contract.”
Note, this is not a promise to abolish zero-hours contracts, just the “exploitative” ones (I immediately wonder how anything called a “zero-hours contract” could be described as “non-exploitative”). Anyway, what this seems to mean is that if you’re on one of these contracts and you work regular hours you will get what he calls “a regular contract”.
With considerable sleight of hand, Unite approves of this: “Labour will ban zero-hour contracts – so if you work regular hours you will get a regular contract.” But if I’m not getting “regular hours”, but instead wait for the phone call each morning to tell me whether to come in for work or not I presumably stay with my zero-hours contract. I don’t call that a ban. And how many people on such contracts get to work regular hours? The joy of zero-hours contracts for bosses is that they don’t have to give regular hours.
In his editorial, Len McCluskey wants us to believe that a Labour government would “attack the evil of zero hours, hire and fire working”, i.e. that zero hours contracts will disappear under Labour.
But Labour’s promise is a tricky bit of wordsmithery that we’d better not fall for, eh Len. It will only be bad for our health. It will only make a bunch of disenchanted voters more bad-tempered than we are already when what we took for a promise disappears into thin air.
And how to vote? I don’t know. That’s why I’m going back to hibernation.
Whatever the rise, it ain’t enough
The Guardian tells us that George Osborne is calling for an above-inflation increase in the minimum wage to £7 an hour. This is to take place in two stages, one in October 2014, one in October 2015. Presumably that means that if we fail to vote Conservative in 2015, we will have only ourselves to blame if we find ourselves still on low pay. Other politicians are jumping around trying to respond. Labour’s shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury says that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls thought of it first. Vince Cable claims he thought of it first. The things they all do to get votes.
Juggle, juggle, juggle. Or should I say smoke and mirrors? Of course the minimum wage should be higher – much higher than £7. But who knows what any of the parties will really do after the next election – on anything, but perhaps especially on this.
Others are being predictable: Mark Littlewood, the director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: “Increasing the minimum wage is a triumph of political aspiration over economic reality”; and the CBI says that a rise to £7 would be “unaffordable”. I doubt it. For it to be suggested at all probably means it is, in their terms, “affordable”, and the bluster is just a knee-jerk reaction. Mandy Rice-Davies should be living at this hour!
Talking of aspiration, I am reminded of a friend who works in what he calls “the bowels of the capitalist system”, the World Financial Center in New York. We were sitting in the restaurant of the Metropolitan Museum 18 months ago and he explained his philosophy to me. It seems that to pay everybody a decent wage can only lead to inflation. In fact, low pay is A Good Thing: not only does it keep inflation down, it is actually good for the low paid. Because it gives them aspirations to higher things, training, education, better jobs where the pay is higher, and they might not have those aspirations otherwise. So don’t give them a living wage now – they just won’t benefit from it. It is, my friend said, in accordance with human nature. So I suppose this means that low pay is beneficial to society.
My friend in New York is a Christian, and I later remembered that Jesus said, “The poor you always have with you.” Capitalist Christians think that means you can’t do anything to finally get rid of poverty. More radical Christians think they ought to do something about poverty, and they also quote the Bible.
George and David, Ed and Ed, and Uncle Vince Cable and all, are not quoting the Bible, and we can at least be thankful for that. What they are doing, though, is making promises. None of us should be thankful for that.
By the way, the Living Wage Foundation last year proposed a living wage rate per hour of £8.55 in London and £7.45 outside London.
Will somebody talk to them please?
Here’s the Guardian article:
A Christmas message to Amazon
You heard about Amazon in an earlier blog (see Amazon undercover). Please sign this petition, which demands the “Living Wage” for Amazon workers. I know the petition describes the “Living Wage” as a living wage, which you may find, as I do, very annoying indeed. But sign the petition anyway – Amazon deserves it. It also deserves to find its warehouses and offices occupied by its own workforce, who, if left to themselves, could run the whole show better than the current owners. But I suspect that’s not going to happen before Christmas!
So SIGN THE PETITION: https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/amazonuk-this-christmas-pay-the-living-wage-across-uk-operations
Don’t grovel – demand!
“It’s not much to ask in return for a year’s work”, argues Barrie Clement in the current issue of Unite the Union’s magazine, uniteWORKS. What’s this about? It’s the “Living Wage”.
The Living Wage was invented by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University. The aim, says Clement, was “to provide the minimum pay rate required to provide the essentials of life.” According to Clement that means “enough to cover rent and energy bills and something left over for one cheap holiday in the UK.”
But the last part of that sentence suggests the grovelly position of the union on this question. Apart from eating and paying the bills, all we deserve “in return for a year’s work” is “one cheap holiday in the UK”. Thanks, Barrie.
Of course, everybody understands that the national minimum wage of £6.31 an hour is not a living wage. But neither is Loughborough’s £7.65 (£8.80 in London), although 5 million people across the UK are paid less than that. Yet, in September, Unite argued to the Low Pay Commission that “the statutory minimum should be uprated in line with the Living Wage.” Why did they argue for that? For replacing poverty wages with – er, well – poverty wages?
It looks like they were less robust than even that. According to Clement, Unite urged the Commission “to ‘take the boldest possible step’ towards doing so.” Whatever could that mean? Do it? Do a bit of it? Don’t do it? How hesitant and grovelly can you get?
It’s not clear what General Secretary Len McCluskey thinks. He says, “The legal minimum should be raised to a living wage to end the desperate wage depression inflicted on working people.” Well, a proper living wage would do that – but not Loughborough’s Living Wage.
There are a number of dangers here. Ed Miliband may have the odd nightmare about the first: the Tories could uprate the minimum wage to the Loughborough levels (Boris Johnson supports Loughborough, David Cameron apparently does) and that would leave Labour with no trousers.
The second danger is for the rest of us: McCluskey and Unite clearly want a Labour government. But – in line with previous form – Labour could promise to implement such an uprating and, on winning the 2015 election, break their promise. “It’s unaffordable to make it anything other than voluntary”, they might say, “both for the public and private sectors. The Tories have left such a mess, we didn’t realise.” If that happened the disillusionment of workers with politics would be increased beyond measure, with all the benefits that that might bring to outfits like UKIP, the BNP and the EDL. But even if Labour did raise the minimum rates to Loughborough levels, low-paid workers would still be left without enough to pay for Barrie Clement’s list of food, rent, energy bills and a cheap holiday.
But a better scenario is possible. Clement tells how cleaners in parliament went on strike to obtain the Loughborough Living Wage – and got it. London Underground cleaners did the same. So imagine what other workers might achieve if they strike, not just for Loughborough but for a proper living wage, well into double figures.
Well, Barrie, I don’t think you meant to send us in that direction – but thanks anyway.
Bob Mouncer's blog 