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| Wage of the Living Dead |
Apart from
local government, Living Wage will never entirely escape London. It is only
London Authorities, top FTSE companies and their haute suppliers that
can offer what is, no-doubt from their point of view, a trivial top-up to
appease slight quivers of discontent in the Capital’s labour market.
It’s easy
to incorporate Living Wage into your corporate chaff when you pay your
workforce above median income from the outset; and equally peasy to make slight
adjustments when the cleaners starting banging on the door demanding the new
base wage you forgot to tell them about.
KPMG, the company who released recent statistics on the Living Wage
—and have been done for fraud, and sued countless times—, look forward
“to the day when the Living Wage brand is as widely known as the Fairtrade brand - and just as widely respected.”[1]
Brand?
That’s quite telling when one of the main Living Wage Foundation partners sees
Living Wage as a brand.
What’s also
quite telling is the Living Wage Foundation accrediting companies, such as
Deloitte[2]
(owners of workfare profiteers Ingeus), who actively implement the Work
Programme, the sanction regime and Mandatory Work Activity (workfare).
Oversight? Unlikely.
Apologies
to the campaigners who, over a decade ago, dreamt up the idea in its present
form; and solidarity with recent struggles to improve waged lots from not
very much to not v. much. But, Living Wage, up-ended from its grassroots, is now top-down Establishment
ideology entangled in the hierarchies of party-political contest and dead-end
policy:
“Just before the General Election, Citizens UK came to see me with a cleaner from the Treasury who wasn’t being paid the living wage. I thought then that if our common life was to mean anything, it should mean that this hard-working woman, who cleaned the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, should be paid at least the living wage.”[3]
The
humility of the Labour
leader is bumbling. Surely, if “our common life was to mean anything” it would
mean wage parity, not wage tokenism.
The extent
to which this Establishment ideology becomes doubly, hypocritically apparent is
in the lauding of the co-opted Living Wage campaign by parties who continue to implement and/or
support workfare, and the recent “no training no pay”[4]
scandal over apprenticeships. Where is the Living Wage for these sections of
the market?
In this
blog’s neck of the woods, Liverpool City Council recently established the
Liverpool Fairness Commission, a warm and fuzzy jumble of words championing a
Living Wage in a future time:
“…where pay differentials and rewards are proportionate and reasonable to reflect work and responsibility and where everyone can receive a Living Wage.”[5]
The best
Liverpool could probably manage is the adoption of a Living Wage by the City
Council and a handful of ‘trusted’ suppliers. But how do you justify this to a
‘citizenry’ facing deep cuts to vital services that will, by Mayor Anderson’s
own admission[6], kill
people?
At the very
least, Living Wage is an experiment in productivity: how much can be squeezed
out of these fleshy bipeds for a few more quid? At most, “it is the right thing to do in
order to help lift the working poor of London out of poverty”.[7]
In reality, it’s a carrot to stick the working class with the only thing they
have to give away: their labour.
[1]
http://www.livingwage.org.uk/our-work (KPMG)
[2]
http://www.boycottworkfare.org/?page_id=517
[3]
http://www.labour.org.uk/ed-miliband-speech-on-the-living-wage
[4]
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/no-training-and-no-pay-scandal-1415514
[5]
http://liverpoolfairnesscommission.com/downloads/Fairness_charter.pdf (Principle 7)
[6]
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2012/10/25/mayor-of-liverpool-promises-to-resign-if-60-000-people-want-him-to-100252-32099855/
[7]
http://www.livingwage.org.uk/our-work (Trust for London)
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