A Living Wage

The Living Wage has been in the news frequently after the figures for 2012 were published in November – and rightly so. It’s not a new idea though, the concept going back at least as far as 1894. 108 years on, The Living Wage Foundation is promoting its implementation and has done so for over 10 years. The new figure of £7.45 per hour is scarcely a king’s ransom but at least it is higher than the current minimum wage for adults of £6.19. That difference is important.
The Centre for Research in Social Policy calculates the Living Wage periodically by looking at the costs of a basket of goods and services that a family needs to reach a minimum acceptable standard of living. It covers more than just the items that are needed for rudimentary survival, such as food, clothing and rent. The calculation includes what is needed to reach a standard of living that is the minimum that is acceptable to a panel of members of the public. It is not at all surprising that this acceptable standard has gone down somewhat since impact of the financial calamity that began in 2008 continues to ripple through.
Almost all people wish to provide for themselves by working for a living (where work still exists and where jobs have not been exported by private sector companies or are being destroyed - as at Remploy – by government). In return, employees should clearly be paid a living wage for their work. People should be able to earn enough on which to live through their work alone. If companies want someone to do a job for them, then they should pay that person enough to reach the minimum standard.
The introduction of the Minimum Wage was a good first step towards paying a living wage, but the level is set too low for a family to live on. People on very low pay therefore often have to rely on support from the state to make ends meet. These benefits are effectively a subsidy to those employers who pay their employees less than enough to live on - with the balance taken from the pockets of the taxpayer. A Living Wage allows people to earn enough on which to live without the state having to intervene in yet another failure of the current rapacious and unprincipled version of capitalism.
All this of course stands in stark contrast to what typically happens at board level. There is an urgent need for sweeping, lasting and inescapable changes to the way in which top-level executives have their pay, bonuses and exit payments decided and the way that they are assessed for tax - and the many ways that legitimate tax is avoided both by individuals and companies some of whom pay less than the Living Wage.
It is entirely wrong that directors’ pay continues to rise at ten per cent a year while many employees are having their wages cut or frozen and their working conditions worsened. The values of fairness and responsibility should apply throughout companies, and in the setting of top-level pay there should be no further rewards for failure and no more huge and unwarranted executive pay increases – frequently made at the expense of low-paid workers.
The Fair Pensions' Just Pay! campaign aims permanently to embed Living Wage standards in the country’s private sector, beginning with the biggest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, namely the FTSE 100. Companies today cannot be counted upon to do the decent thing of their own accord so it will have to be made a requirement to end the present injustice and exploitation.