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 most recent incarnation of a demand for a living wage movement started in the USA – in Baltimore the early 1990s – and it has since spread to many cities in the USA, before coming to the UK in the early 2000s. For the latest calculations about the impact of the living wage on workers and employers across the UK, please go to the 'numbers and money page'.

There are important historical legacies of the demand for a living wage which go back to miners in Britain during the 1870s and as Sidney and Beatrice Webb argued, the early trade unions started to challenge the ‘doctrine of supply and demand’ with the ‘doctrine of a living wage’. A living wage bill was actually proposed in the House of Commons in February 1931 by James Maxton MP, and - with remarkable contemporary resonance - Maxton located the policy within the context of the curse of under-consumption. At a time of economic crisis and high unemployment, and in the wake of the general strike, Maxton and his ILP colleagues sought to focus on the politics of consumption. A living wage, they argued, would allow the population to consume ‘the essential things of life … food, better housing, better furnishing, equipment inside their home, better illumination of those homes, and better sanitation.’ This, in turn, would stimulate growth, jobs and prosperity for the nation at large: putting money into the pockets of poor people was argued to be a way out of decline.

Following the development of the welfare state after WWII, the demand for a living wage subsided until its most recent manifestation in London, since 2001.

London Citizens – a broad based alliance of faith organisations, schools, trade union branches and community groups – launched the call for a living wage in April 2001. They made an argument that low pay had costs for the whole community, impacting on health, educational achievement and parenting, family life and civility. Since that call, the campaign has spread from hospitals, to the finance houses of Canary Wharf and the City, to Universities, local government and shops. 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 the massive investment reach at least some of London’s working poor.

For a chronological history of the campaign, please click here.

Since 2005, The Mayors of London, Ken Livingstone – followed from 2008 by Boris Johnson – have put resources into a living wage unit at City Hall. A team of researchers establish the living wage figure for London each year. 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)

In 2006, Queen Mary pledged to be the first living wage campus in the UK and the story of the cleaning service and its move back in-house has been the subject of a short report that you can access here:
The business case for the living wage: the story of the cleaning service at Queen Mary [PDF 1.52 MB]

In 2011 Queen Mary was proud to become a founding partner of the new Living Wage Foundation which seeks to disseminate the concept of, and commitment to paying, the living wage across the UK.

For a summary of the key developments and estimates of the money redistributed, click here.

For the past decade, I have been researching the development and impact of the London living wage.

These are some of the documents that summarise the work that I’ve done:

The first project aimed to map the numbers and characteristics of the workers falling into the gap between the newly calculated LLW and the National Minimum Wage in 2001. This project, funded by UNISON, produced the report called Mapping Low Pay [pdf, 364kb].

As part of the ESRC’s Identity and Social Action programme I then explored 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 also available and you can download a press release related summarising this work.

Working with colleagues, I have also located the demand for a living wage in the context of London’s low paid economy, the significance of subcontracting and increased volumes of immigrant labour supply. This ESRC-funded research has been published in a book called Global Cities at Work: New migrant divisions of labour (Pluto, 2010) and you can find out more from the project website.

The following papers make the argument that the living wage campaign has successfully prosecuted a traditional labour demand (for increased wages and better conditions) via unusual means – through a broad-based coalition, operating at the scale of the labour market, deploying the authority of official government and using the media to increase the pressure for change.

Photos © Chris Jepson

A global workforce in a global city: The skills, experiences and aspirations of a group of contract cleaners in London, UK (April 2007) reports the extraordinary diversity and labour market histories of the 105 workers cleaning one building at Canary Wharf.

Making class politics possible: Organizing contract cleaners in London International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008, 32, 2, 305–24.

Subcontracted employment and its challenge to labour. Labor Studies Journal, 2009, 34, 4. NB: you have access to this paper as a special concession from the journal as it was the most downloaded article in 2009 and 2010.

The living wage. Soundings: A journal of politics and culture, 2009, 42, 33-46. [pdf, 180kb]

Religion at work: The role of faith-based organisations in living wage campaigns for immigrant workers in London. Special issue entitled Transforming Work, The Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2009, 2, 3, 443-62. (Written with Kavita Datta, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert, Jon May and Cathy McIlwaine).

A Living Wage Olympics
Prior to London winning the bid to host the Olympic Games in 2012, London Citizens (LC) secured an agreement to make this the first ever living wage Olympics. In 2012, LC worked with LOCOG to ensure that local unemployed people get to the front of the hiring queues for the living wage jobs. LC set up a pioneering community-led job brokerage to identify local talent and organise recruitment meetings with the Olympic contractors.More than 1200 local people got living wage jobs through this work.

This work is summarised in this short editorial:
Wills, J. London’s Olympics in 2012: The good, the bad and an organising opportunity. Political Geography, 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.003

Our undergraduate students were commisssioned to evaluate this initiative and the four best reports - written by Sakera Begum, Nadine Clokey, Poppy Coppins and Jackie Mong - can be downloaded here:

Bringing the Olympics to East London - Nadine Clokey

The London 2012 Olympics: Local Jobs for Local People? - Investigating a communityy-led employment initiative - Jackie Mong

London 2012 Olympics: bringing a new flame to the East End? - Poppy Coppins

Olympic jobs for local people: Investigating a community-led employment initiative - Sakera Begum

The living wage campaign is also outlined in these chapters available in edited books:

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)

Faith in Politics, Urban Studies, 2008, 45, 10, 2035–2056. (written with Lina Jamoul). And for an earlier version of this paper, please click here: [pdf, 240kb]

The London Living Wage in A. Kumar, J. A. Scholte, M. Kaldor, M. Glasius, H. Seckinelgin and H. Anheier (eds) Global Civil Society Yearbook 2009: Poverty and activism. London: Sage, 176-182.

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/.

Photo © Chris Clunn