Reasons to pay employees a Real Living Wage
The Real Living Wage is recommended over the normal ‘minimum wage’, which is leaving people in full-time having to visit food banks in some cases. Iceland’s manager recently said that some people are even not buying potatoes or root veggies, as they can’t afford to boil them, once they get home.
You can’t just ‘roll up at a food bank’ as some MPs suggest. You usually have to prove income. Jack Monroe (who created the Vimes Food Index) says that the true cost of supermarket goods is making champagne cheaper in comparison than apples. Which have gone up by way more in recent years.
At present, the government’s Living Wage (minimum wage) is less than the Real Living Wage (and is voluntary, though many employers are now choosing to use it). It costs less long-term, as staff on good pay and conditions stay longer, so it saves having to re-hire and advertise for staff yet again.
Reasons to pay a real living wage
Staff that are well looked after (including paid well) tend to be happier and healthier, and have a better life/work balance. They can buy nice things for their homes, eat better and afford child care.
The legal living wage is around £1.48 less than the voluntary Living Wage. That works out around an extra £60 a week, if working full-time. This can cover the cost of a dental check-up, a couple of pairs of quality vegan shoes, or calling someone out to fix a leaky appliance or dodgy boiler. The cost of a train fare to visit a relative.
Think of the difference that £60 a week can make to one employee’s life.
In February 2024, the government named 500 companies that were not even paying minimum wage (including high street brands who have been ordered to pay millions in backdated salaries). Most said it was due to ‘genuine errors’, and one even blamed the government for increasing the minimum age.
Clean for Good (London) is a company that pays all employees the voluntary Living Wage, in an industry (housekeeping for hotels) that is known for low salaries, while guests pay eye-popping prices for luxury suites.
Living Income goes hand-in-hand with a Living Wage, creating universal payments to help families and people with disabilties. The two-child benefit cap was plunging families into poverty, 60% of whom worked. It also wants an end to five-week waits for universal credit.
This does not encourage a benefits-dependent society. It means parents and carers and volunteers and pensioners (the latter of who make up most of the welfare bill) are protected. Just like they are in countries like Denmark (the happiest nation on earth, where people are protected financially from cradle to grave).
Together these make up the Social Guarantee, that basically means everyone’s needs are met. Everyone has enough food to eat, enough money to live on and a place to call home. Others get access to social care, affordable public transport, childcare and Internet access (this can help to find everything from medical care and mental health support to good jobs).
On the contrary to ‘making people lazy’, the evidence is the opposite. People who have good food and nice homes and access to affordable transport, tend to go out and work (if not volunteering) as they feel better physically and mentally, have ways to get to work, and money to buy interview clothes etc.
Which supermarkets pay a real living wage?
German-owned Aldi and Lidl do (just like furniture-company IKEA, due to be Swedish-owned).
Manchester’s Unicorn Grocery pays a proper Living Wage, with casual staff paid 80% of that (or the real Living Wage, whichever is higher).
Do MPs know prices of everyday goods?
Some do, others don’t. The ‘basket of goods’ is how the government’s Living Wage is calculated. It includes ‘everyday items’ like bread, milk and vegetables, with new items added yearly (this year’s additions were an air-fryer and hand gel).
Based on average earnings, the Real Living Wage (voluntary) is calculated by real people, not quangos at Whitehall on high salaries.
MPs present receive a salary of around £84K (plus expenses). When he was Prime Minister, David Cameron famously got cornered when asked if he knew the price of a loaf of bread.
He got out of it by saying that he baked his own bread using granary flour. Then made things worse, by recommending a £100 bread-maker and premium flour (that cost over £30 for a bulk bag).
Similarly, Rishi Sunak when asked replied that as a health-conscious family, they all have different Hovis ‘seeded breads’. Both answers are fine – but not when they are then cutting benefits from the poorest in society, who then can’t afford to buy bread.
You can look up how your MP voted to cut or retain welfare benefits. There’s something that sticks about multi-millionaires cutting benefits of the poorest in society, whatever their arguments. At least they should try to live on them for a while.
To give him credit, former Tory MP Matthew Parris did try years ago in Tyneside. He spent £11 on food, and 62p for a bus to a £2 football game.
And when he had 61p left, he ran out of money for the meter and could not even afford to buy a drink at the local working men’s club. He soon gave up politics, and now writes (often excellent) articles for newspapers on society.
If you do not ensure that people are being paid a living wage, then you are going to have people who rely on government assistance. It’s that simple. Ron Crumpton
No more ‘silly made-up jobs’
In his book Bullshit Jobs, the late David Graeber wrote how society is set up to create jobs that ‘don’t exist’. You know the ones: telemarketers and ‘team meetings’ with people drawing things on whiteboards, creating ‘mission statements’.
We don’t need jobs like this, which are usually created to manipulate job figures for the government stats. We need more ‘real jobs’. carers and wildlife rescuers, dog walkers, carpenters, green builders, teachers, hospice workers, community chefs.
Many people in England are working on jobs they hate, simply to earn money. But money is not everything, it’s important to do work that you love and that makes a difference to your community.
Graeber grouped bullshit jobs into five types:
- Flunkies: roles that make someone else look or feel important. Think receptionists hired for empty foyers, or assistants whose main task is to signal status.
- Goons: roles that exist only because others have them. Think PR hit-squads trading press hits, or aggressive sales teams battling for the same pie.
- Duct tapers: roles created to fix problems that should not exist. Think staff paid to patch broken systems rather than fix the system itself.
- Box tickers: roles that produce reports and metrics to prove work is happening, even when it is not.
- Taskmasters: managers who create work for others, or oversee teams that do not need oversight.
You have likely experience of this. Ever gone into a Lush or Next shop? You’re bombarded the minute you arrive, with people ‘greeting you”. They look bored out of their brain, and the first thing you do is leave the shop. It would be far better if Next spent money on improving their ethics score at Good on You.
The NHS budget is bursting. But we have managers and middle managers, who waste money and energy on lit-up appointment boards. That money could be used to fund nursing assistants, to take the load off nurses and doctors. Proper jobs!
In a YouGov survey, 37% of British workers said their job did not make a meaningful contribution to the world. That is a lot of wasted potential.
Ask three simple questions, to determine if you’re in a silly job:
- What would break if I stopped doing this for a month?
- Who would notice, and why?
- Does my job help anyone or the community?
David Graeber (the anthropologist who coined the term ‘bullshit jobs’) was a fan of Universal Income, rather than a society where the blue-collar workers got ill from exhaustion, and white-collar workers did ‘invented jobs’ going round with clipboards, to check how others were doing:
For some reason, we as a society have collectively decided to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives, pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings. Rather than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes or sit in cafés arguing about politics.
