So before I begin, this blog post is not about the minimum wage, which annoyingly the government renamed the National Living Wage. It is about the independently set Living Wage, updated every Autumn by the Living Wage Foundation.
And, now that’s out of the way….
There are several good reasons to pay your employees as well as you can afford to. The most obvious one, particularly with recruitment being so tricky, is simply attracting the best staff to your organisation. I’ve always believed that recruitment is the most important management task in any organisation. Get the right, or best people, and the rest becomes immediately easier. This reason is also part of why I’ve put massive amounts of energy and time into better and more inclusive recruitment over recent years, but that’s for another Blog post, as it’s Living Wage week, so I’m going to focus on that today.
The two charities that I’ve led have both been Living Wage accredited. In my current role at Stonegrove Community Trust, I started as the only employee, so initially, achieving that accreditation wasn’t too challenging! However, we did have partners and contractors paid below that rate, so we put in place a plan to change that over time. I cannot state with certainty that the larger and occasional companies that we contract to all pay the Living Wage, but certainly our regular ones do, and we do within our growing staff team.
The number of employees paid under the Living Wage in the UK has fallen to its lowest amount in over ten years, at around 3.5 million people. Sadly the latest research from the Living Wage Foundation suggests that this is a “Blip” and forecasts a rise to over 5 million people in 2023.
In the social sector (or whatever your preferred descriptor is), we often rely to a substantial extent on our mission and impact to attract and recruit staff. Arguably this isn’t working as well as it used to (see above), but that is not the only reason we should seek to better pay our staff for their time, skills and experience.
It simply seems unethical to pay staff a wage they cannot live on. A wage level that means they are forced to seek help from other charities to live, even to survive currently. While I’ve believed this for a long time, it’s come into sharper focus recently, with the “cost of living/surviving” crisis hitting such a large proportion of those around us, both those we serve, and those we work alongside. At Stonegrove Community Trust, I’m proud that we pay our staff as well as we can. Our salaries and conditions are decent and fair. As a result of that, and hopefully, partly due to my half-decent leadership, we’ve got a fantastic team doing incredible work!
This year the Living Wage Foundation announced their new rates two months early, in September rather than November, announcing an 8.1% rise in the London Living Wage and urging employers to begin paying the new rate as soon as possible. Our policy is usually to pay the new rate from January (the latest allowed is April), but this year we decided to pay them immediately, from 1st October. I’m lucky to have a Trustee board that shares my vision of living our values and caring for our people, so they were entirely behind this decision. It did need to be considered carefully, as we’re already forecasting a deficit in this financial year, and this means adding to it. We decided however, that the slight increase in the planned deficit is a price worth paying to better support our lower-paid staff members through a potentially challenging Winter.
Despite the forecast deficit, I acknowledge our privilege in that we’re better off than some similar charities. I would, though, urge anyone reading this to consider what actions they can take to support those potentially most vulnerable to the current “cost of living/surviving” crisis within their organisations or teams. Signing up for the Living Wage is one positive action if you haven’t yet, but there are many others.
When I next have some “spare” time, I’m going to write about our new(ish) inclusive recruitment practices at SCT, and also try to highlight some of the interesting people I am learning from or inspired by in this space in our sector.
For now, signing off as it’s late, and frankly, time for some RnR before tomorrow brings new challenges.