The Living Wage Foundation (LWF) has always enjoyed cross-party support, and with a new government finally in power, we are excited to engage with the new administration to ensure that a hard day’s work results in a fair day’s pay.
Despite the huge success of the Living Wage movement, there is still a long way to go to ensure that workers in the UK have both the security of working hours and enough money to live on. Embracing a place-based approach to campaigning for workers’ rights, alongside a robust national campaign, is essential for driving meaningful social change and winning a real Living Wage for more workers.
The real Living Wage and Living Hours
The real Living Wage is currently (July 2024) £12 per hour in the UK, and £13.15 per hour in London, for all workers aged 18 years and over. These figures are calculated annually by the Resolution Foundation, using the best available data on what is needed for a dignified life. The calculation takes into account things like the weekly food shop and household bills but also costs like a surprise dentist trip or a new school uniform for growing children. Since our inception, we have successfully accredited more than 15,000 employers across the UK, who have committed to paying their workers enough to cover the cost of living year on year.
One in nine people now work for a Living Wage Employer, and although we’ve put £3bn back into the pockets of workers since the beginning of the campaign over 20 years ago, there is still so much work to do. It’s not just low pay at the heart of our campaign work; we also care deeply about creating secure work for people, as well as adequate pensions to ensure a decent standard of living throughout retirement. The combined issues of low pay and insecure work in the UK disproportionately affect people already facing multiple forms of disadvantage. We know from our own research that there are 3.4 million workers in the UK who are both on low pay and on insecure contracts. We also know that ethnic minority workers, young workers and older workers are more likely to be on low pay and in insecure contracts. Our research shows that being in this position comes with an insecurity premium, meaning increases in travel and childcare costs when, for example, shifts are changed at short notice. Our Living Hours scheme aims to eliminate this precarity by asking employers to guarantee at least 16 hours of paid work per week, with four weeks’ minimum notice of shift changes, and a contract that accurately reflects the number of hours worked.
Local and regional approach
We are a national organisation, but much of our campaigning work happens through a place-based scheme called Living Wage Places. The scheme is a partnership approach to increasing wage uplifts and, increasingly, secure working hours, in a particular city or region, where a number of key partners come together to raise awareness of the Living Wage campaign and work to deliver a local action plan supported by LWF. In many Living Wage Places, there is also a Citizens UK Chapter. This brings an element of community organising to our work, which keeps us rooted in the needs of local people and workers within each area. Citizens UK is the country’s biggest and most diverse alliance of associations and local people working on the issues that matter to them to bring about social change through the method of community organising. LWF is part of Citizens UK, although our approaches have some significant differences (LWF is primarily a business-to-business organisation). Through Citizens UK, community organisers share their expertise with action groups on successful campaigning, on what actions are happening locally and on help to strengthen local ‘anchor’ groups to embed organising into their culture. There is also a strong focus on developing leaders within member organisations and in sectors such as social care and hospitality, where the real Living Wage and Living Hours could have the most significant impact.
Although our approaches and theories of change have distinct differences, the combination of the Citizens UK and LWF approaches is proving successful. A flagship example is the Making London a Living Wage City project, funded by Trust for London. The project connects Living Wage Places action groups with Citizens UK Chapters across London, so that LWF staff and community organisers work together with accredited employers, anchor institutions and local leaders to increase accreditations in their region and grow power from the bottom up.
What can the new government do to improve people’s lives through better working conditions?
The new government could embed and promote the real Living Wage through public procurement and grant-making, supporting a race to the top where employers who provide the real Living Wage are recognised and incentivised with government contracts and grants. The new government could also embolden its policies to end in-work poverty and insecure work by investing in place-based initiatives such as Living Wage Places. This wouldn’t just have an impact on people in communities, but has benefits for the economy too. Across our 17 Living Wage places we have accredited over 3,000 employers which equates to 85,578 wage uplifts for employees, as well as seeing the growth of power and action at the community level. We have seen the most effective changes in places where community organising is incorporated into our approach to campaigning on the real Living Wage and Living Hours.
Initiatives that work simultaneously on business-to-business campaigns and developing the capacity of workers to speak up for themselves are, in our experience, most likely to have a positive outcome – not only on income and secure work, but on what that means for working people in terms of inequality, mental wellbeing and physical health. Growing power at the local level, using citizen intelligence to develop tailored campaigns in partnership with businesses, anchor institutions and local government is how we make a real difference to people’s lives.
Ellie Farmahan oversees evaluation and learning for the Living Wage Foundation within the Living Wage Places scheme.
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