Trade unions and the real Living Wage: survey evidence from the UK

Abstract

This article uses evidence from a survey of accredited Living Wage Employers to examine the extent to which trade unions have supported, campaigned for and been involved in the introduction of the voluntary or ‘real’ Living Wage in the UK. It reports that while unions tended to view the adoption of the Living Wage favourably and to support its introduction they typically were not heavily involved either in the initial decision to adopt the standard or in its implementation. This pattern of findings, it is suggested, is consistent with the union response to corporate social responsibility initiatives and provides only limited support for the commonly argued position that ‘economic justice’ movements provide fertile ground for the development of union‐community coalitions.

The Living Wage in the UK: testing the limits of soft regulation?

“…At an aggregate level, the achievement of significant wage gains with few of the adverse effects in terms of job losses almost certainly reflects the relatively low absolute numbers of workers covered by the Living Wage and the problem of the limited scale of initiatives, which solely rely on social sanctions or loss of legitimacy, within individual firms. For example, nearly three-quarters of the 5000 accredited Living Wage employers are small and medium-sized enterprises with fewer than 50 employees (Heery et al, 2018), and an estimated 120,000 workers across the UK are estimated to have directly benefited from wage increases as a result of their employer voluntarily adopting the UK or London Living Wage since 2011, when the Living Wage Foundation accreditation scheme was first established (Heery et al, 2017). To put this figure into perspective, there are an estimated 5.75 million jobs (22 per cent of the total) across the UK that pay less than the Living Wage (IHS Markit, 2018).…”

“…Nevertheless, the UK experience suggests that the Living Wage is broadly compatible with the presence of collective agreements and trade unions. Although there are significant clusters of accredited firms in sectors that are relatively non-unionised such as construction and retail, the presence of large Living Wage employers in the public sector means that the actual coverage of workers is strongly concentrated in unionised parts of the economy (Heery et al, 2018). In the US, campaigners have tended to start with local councils 'because they can' (Freeman, 2005), and attempt to build alliances with sympathetic politicians (Swarts and Vasi, 2011).…”

The British Home Stores pension scheme: privatised looting?

“…Recent contributions to the employment relations literature examine the impact of state‐led austerity (Heery et al ., ), welfare retrenchment (Yates, ), the potential for deepening inequalities at work (Wolfson, ) and subsequent increases in precarious work and precarious employment status (Vershinina et al, ). Pensions and appropriation of value from pension schemes have been largely lacking from this analysis, but as demonstrated in this article, investor–owner use of employer pension fund contributions to take money out of a firm and borrow against a pension scheme represents significant historical wage theft.…”

“Money’s too tight (to mention)”: a review and psychological synthesis of living wage research

“…Concurrent with the expansion of study from other disciplines has been research on the living wage movement itself, increasing understanding of the processes of campaigning, and of how social movements gain and retain their momentum to effect change within society (e.g., Luce, 2005b;Wills et al, 2009). Study here includes the significance of stakeholders such as trade unions (Heery et al, 2018) and faith-based organizations (e.g., Wills et al, 2009). Examination of 10 years of living wage campaigns identifies key lessons in how to build successful social movements (Luce, 2005b).…”