Researching London’s living wage campaign

Jane Wills, Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, j.wills@qmul.ac.uk, 0207 882 5414

The living wage movement started in the USA – with Baltimore in 1994 – and it has since spread to the UK.

London has had a living wage campaign – led by London Citizens – since 2001 and for a chronological history of the campaign, please click here

The campaign has spread from hospitals, to the finance houses of Canary Wharf and the City to Universities, art galleries and hotels. Given the excitement about 2012, the campaign has also secured agreements that all the new jobs at the Olympic site will be living wage, making sure that the benefits of investment reach at least some of London’s working poor.

Since 2005, Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, has put resources into a living wage unit at City Hall and he has a team of researchers that establish the living wage figure for London. This table shows the gap between the National Minimum Wage and London’s living wage – and the GLA calculate that about 1 in 5 workers in London fall into this gap.

Mapping the gap between the National Minimum Wage and the London Living Wage

* set by the Government funded Low Pay Commission (http://www.lowpay.gov.uk)
** calcuated by the GLA from 2005
(http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/economic_unit/workstreams/living-wage.jsp)

The campaign has secured gains for more than 5000 workers in London, all of them working for different cleaning contractors, including companies such as ISS, Lancaster, Mitie, Principle and Rentokil-Initial. In one case – Queen Mary, University of London – managers decided to bring the service back in-house as a result of the campaign.

I have been monitoring the progress of the campaign since it started in 2001, and between 2005 and 2007 I had financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to do some more detailed research.

This work was part of the ESRC’s Identity and Social Action programme and aimed to explore the links between cleaning, cleaners and political mobilisation. A short leaflet summarising the findings of this research can be downloaded here. The final research report submitted to the ESRC is available.
A press release related to this work is available.

I have located the research in the context of a declining trade union movement, a growth in low paid service work and experiments to create new forms of urban politics.

This paper highlights the importance of subcontracting as the new paradigm of employment in capitalist society and looks at why the living wage model has succeeded where others have failed:
A new employment paradigm and its challenge to labour (September 2007)

These developments are explored more fully in relation to the organisation of cleaners at Canary Wharf and in the City of London here:
Organising contract cleaners in London (December 2007). A published version of this paper – called Making class politics possible: Organizing contract cleaners in London – is also available from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008, 32, 2, 305–24.

The extraordinary diversity and stories of the 105 workers cleaning one building at Canary Wharf are documented in this report:
A global workforce in a global city: The skills, experiences and aspirations of a group of contract cleaners in London, UK (April 2007)

These book chapters also provide more background to the campaign in London and include case studies of the campaign in the hospitals and Canary Wharf.

Campaigning for low paid workers: The East London Communities Organisation (TELCO) Living Wage Campaign, in W. Brown, G. Healy, E. Heery and P. Taylor (eds) The Future of Worker Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004 p.264–282.

Organizing labor in London: Lessons from the campaign for a living wage, in L. Turner and D. Cornfield (eds) Labour in the new urban battlegrounds: Local solidarity in a global economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007, 211–23. (written with Jane Holgate)

The research has also looked at the unique coalition of civil society organisations involved in London Citizens and explored the grounds on which they are able to stand together in defence of the low paid. I have interviewed Priests, trade union leaders, teachers and community activists and asked them why they get involved, what kind of relationships they have with their colleagues in London Citizens and the impact of the campaign on their organisation.

This paper looks at the involvement of faith organisations in more detail: Faith in politics in the city today (January 2007, written with Lina Jamoul). A published version of this paper – called Faith in Politics – is also available from Urban Studies, 2008, 45, 10, 2035–2056.

The ESRC also commissioned the photographer Chris Clunn to work with a number of the Identities research projects and you can see some wonderful pictures that reflect the range of tasks involved in cleaning a large office building, the skills involved in the work and the ethnic diversity of the cleaners doing the work by going to:
http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/cleaners/.

There are also close links to another ESRC-funded Global Cities at Work project that explores the role and experiences of migrant workers in low paid employment in London, see http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/globalcities/ where other research papers are available.