Only two cheers for Bristol’s Living Wage

Tomorrow, Bristol City Council (BCC) will almost certainly adopt a report that will see it commit to bringing all its staff currently paid below the Living Wage up to that level – currently £7.65 per hour.

This will not only apply to council staff but also to staff in schools that use the council payroll. As a result, more than 1,500 workers will benefit, comprising almost 600 council staff and 900-plus school employees.

There is still some way to go before BCC can become an Accredited Living Wage Employer like Green-led Brighton or Labour-controlled Birmingham but it is a step in the right direction and all those who campaigned for it, including politicians from several parties as well as a number of hard-working campaigners, should give each other a pat on the back.

So, why only two cheers?

Because, despite the undoubted individual success stories, many of us who believe in the core idea that a decent day’s work deserves a decent day’s pay are aware that the number of workers being paid below a Living Wage is increasing, not decreasing.

Since 2011, the numbers of workers paid less than a Living Wage has jumped by 50% from 3.4 million to 5.2 million today. For the first time, the majority of the 13million people living in poverty are in working households.

Even in London, lauded by successive governments for its economic success, and where the highest wages are paid, 750,000 are still paid below the London Living Wage of almost £9 per hour despite the support of a Conservative Mayor and many high profile organisations including Goldman Sachs, Barclays and the TUC.

This is the context into which we have to place the decision of BCC to bring 1,500 staff a decent, livable rate of pay.

However, the importance of Bristol adopting the scheme should not be underestimated. Although most of the pressure to adopt the Living Wage has come from the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Labour, it has been a Conservative politician, Geoff Gollop, who has been tasked with introducing the Living Wage, and has made clear that he was committed to doing so in a way that was sustainable.

This is important – because the fact that a public sector organisation, operating in an area of public spending that has been subject to the deepest cuts of all (£90m in the current phase of austerity), and subject to levels of regulation and public scrutiny that is alien to the vast majority of private sector, has been able to implement the Living Wage surely demonstrates that a Living Wage is achievable by many more organisations.

Of the five million-plus low paid workers, almost 500,000 work in the public sector.  The biggest single employer of staff paid below the Living Wage is the NHS.

A recent study by the US-based Commonwealth Fund comparing the health care systems of 11 different countries ranked the NHS as easily the best performing system – it came top in six of the nine topic areas studied, and was in the top three of two others.  At the same time its costs were the second lowest of the 11 systems studied.

If the NHS was a private sector company, the fact that it was world beating in such a cost effective manner would be splashed across the financial and business press and its executive staff would be head-hunted by No. 10 to head up an independent inquiry into why the British economy is experiencing the slowest recovery from a recession since the South Sea Bubble burst at the beginning of the 18th century.

Instead, our politicians want the NHS to continue down the path of privatisation – despite the fact that the US health system, the health system that is the most privatised in the world, came rock bottom of the same performance table that the NHS topped.  A lack of performance that comes despite the US system having per capita costs more than twice those of the NHS.

Meanwhile those same politicians continue to cite the NHS as unaffordable, and in turn use that as an excuse to pay low wages.

A public sector statutory implementation of a Living Wage would have a net cost to the Treasury of some £360m – equivalent to just one quarter of one per cent of public spending, and the same as the amount of money the government spent in 2012 on direct marketing to advertise itself.

If council employees are worthy of a decent day’s pay (and they are) then surely so are the staff of the NHS who are at the core of what the government might have spent some of that marketing money to advertise as a world beating British company – if it didn’t undermine the ideology that the private sector is always better so completely and utterly.

And if kitchen staff serving up school meals for pupils, or serving up hospital meals for patients are clearly worthy of a decent rate of pay, then surely those working in the private sector serving up hotel meals to guests, or restaurant meals for customers, are too.

A Living Wage council is good, but a Living Wage country would be even better.