Vice-Chancellor Martin Hall is pictured with other Salford Living Wage participants, Trade Unions and Salford City Council members at last week’s accreditation event.
The Living Wage is the minimum amount that a person, or a family, must earn to avoid relative poverty. It’s calculated each year by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, incorporating key factors such as mortgage and rental rates, the cost of living and the extent of benefits and taxation levels. Currently, the Living Wage outside London is set at £7.45 per hour, which is about 20 per cent higher than the national statutory Minimum Wage.
Employers who decide to pay all their staff at or above the Living Wage can apply to be accredited by the Living Wage Foundation. We recently achieved accreditation, along with the City of Salford. We are one of only five universities in the country to be accredited, and the first in the Northwest.
Significantly, this is the first time that a university and its local authority have made this commitment together, bringing together the two largest local employers, and complementing the other Salford organisations that are already paying the Living Wage: Salix Homes, Salford Community Leisure, City West Housing Trust, Helping Hands, Together Housing Group and Great Places. This will give critical mass and momentum to a movement that will make a significant difference to the standard of living in Salford, and will contribute the mitigating the pernicious effects of household income inequality.
There are four reasons why committing to the Living Wage is important for our University.
Firstly, there will be a direct effect on people whose employment is funded by us. While all our substantive employees are already paid above the Living Wage, we do have one hundred or so indirect or casual employees paid at or above the statutory Minimum Wage but below the Living Wage. This is, evidently, inequitable.
Secondly, adopting the principles of the Living Wage Foundation directs us to look carefully and critically at our procurement policies and practices. While we would not be able, for a range of reasons, to require or ensure that our suppliers themselves pay at or above the Living Wage, we can and should find out if they do, and make the case why they should. Taking suppliers’ employment practices into account is a logical extension of the Fair Trade principles that we apply in contracting for catering, and the extension of our Carbon Management Plan to take into account the benefits of local procurement.
Thirdly, our University is located in a part of the country – and of the City Region – that has the most substantial concentration of need, as measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation. This means that people and families in our immediate neighborhood are among the most likely to face un- or under-employment and low household incomes. This is why it is so important that the largest employers in Salford are working together in adopting the Living Wage. As Lynn Collins, Regional Secretary of the TUC, stressed at our recent launch event, paying the Living Wage both mitigates the risk of relative poverty for the beneficiaries while also putting more money into the local economy, supporting local businesses and adding to job security. Research by the Living Wage Foundation shows that additional local economic benefits include reduced absenteeism and improvements in the quality of work.
The University is proud to be one of only five universities in the country to be accredited by the Living Wage Foundation, and the first in the Northwest.
Fourthly, our University is among the largest in Britain for learning, teaching and professional development in the Health and Social Care professions, shortly to be augmented by their alignment with Sociology and associated disciplines. A significant amount of teaching, professional enhancement and research in these fields is about the prevention, and mitigation, of relative poverty and the consequences of income inequality. As with other areas that are our signature focus as a university, we need to ensure that our practices as an organisation are consistent with the principles and imperatives of our work as a university. Signing up to the Living Wage contributes to this.
The Living Wage campaign was launched in 2001 by parents in East London, who were frustrated that working two minimum wage jobs left no time for family life. Since then, the campaign has gained significant momentum and cross-party political support. It is estimated that more that 45,000 families have been lifted out of working poverty as a direct result of this movement. There is no doubt that the adoption of the Living Wage by a group of organisations with this common purpose will make a significant difference to our city.
——————————————————————————————————————————
Living Wage Foundation: http://www.livingwage.org.uk/
A Minimum Income Standard for the UK: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/crsp/mis/
