Staff at new Streatham Leisure Centre won't be paid Living Wage

Despite a promise that all its staff and contractors will be paid a Living Wage, when Lambeth Council's new Leisure Centre opens in Streatham on 18th November it seems some staff may be earning as little as £5.61 an hour.

The advert here from contractor Greenwich Leisure Limited (GLL) shows, Assistant Customer Service Advisors at the new Leisure Centre being recruited for £5.61 to £7.66 an hour. The bottom rate is just two thirds of the Living Wage rate, currently set in London at £8.55 an hour.

It has already been established that Lambeth Council didn't even try to negotiate a Living Wage for employees at the new Tesco megastore, which is also part of the new hub development. But it seems that even staff contracted to run the leisure services won't be paid a Living Wage.

Streatham has been without a leisure centre for four years, after years of under investment led to the roof falling in and its closure in November 2009. Lambeth then negotiated a £26 million deal with Tesco to build a new leisure centre on the site of the Ice Rink, with a colossal Tesco superstore being built on the site of the old leisure centre. The store now towers above the new leisure centre along with 250 apartments which are being marketed at overseas buy-to-let investors, under the slogan "come to live, come to invest".

After pressure from Greens, Lambeth finally agreed to extend the Living Wage to contractors at the end of 2012. (This covers contractors like Greenwich Leisure Limited, who will run the new Leisure Centre in Streatham).

When Lambeth Council became a Living Wage employer, Lambeth Labour Party were quick to claim that it would mean:

"Labour in Labour can make sure that staff who are employed by contractors on the Council’s behalf will now also benefit from the wage rise".

But Labour has form for making false claims on the Living Wage. In the same press release Labour stated:

"Lambeth Council has been paying the London Living Wage to all staff that it directly employs since 2006"

But as its own council report stated clearly, even six years later - in October 2012 - it wasn't paying it to some trainee social workers, cleaners, staff it directly employed in schools, not to mention apprentices.

In 2012 Lambeth decided to apply for formal Living Wage accreditation. As part of this it promised to negotiate a Living Wage with contractors. I raised the issue, at a public meeting to discuss the new leisure centre with Lambeth councillors, Lambeth officers, representatives of Greenwich Leisure. who said they were fully aware of this commitment. But it appears that they have not stuck to it.

The role of Assistant Customer Service Advisor, which is being advertised at a rate which is just two thirds of the Living Wage, is an outward facing one. The successful applicant will be:

"Responsible for delivering an excellent service to all customers by answering telephones, providing customer information, handling transactions, managing customer access, responding to sales enquiries and converting them into sales, and dealing with customer complaints, mainly within the reception and sales areas."

This is precisely the kind of job that the Living Wage should benefit, boosting morale, making staff feel valued and enhancing the quality of their work, and so benefiting everyone who comes into contact with them. It won't just be the employees who will the be poorer for the absence of the Living Wage from the new leisure centre, but everyone who visits.

The new leisure centre will open on 18th November just after National Living Wage Week.

Tescos pays "equivalent" to Living Wage if employees on minimum wage spend £511 a week....at Tesco

We have now finally received figures from Tesco in its attempt to substantiate its claim, made at the public meeting last week regarding the new Streatham Tesco megastore, that it pays "the equivalent" of the London Living Wage.

By way of background, the claim was made by Matthew Magee, (@TescoLondon) Regional Corporate Affairs Manager, following my question to him. I asked him to confirm that Tesco would pay workers in Streatham the London Living Wage - set at £8.55 to reflect the wage that a person needs to meet basic needs in the capital.

Tesco notoriously pays its cleaning staff the minimum wage (currently £6.19 for an over 21 year old). But the claim was made by Tesco's representative at the public meeting at the Streatham Hideaway, that with all the benefits that Tesco staff receive, they get the "equivalent" of the London Living Wage.

The benefits listed by Matthew Magee now provided to support this claim are as follows:

An 11% pension contribution (which doesn't count because a pension is paid to everyone who receives the Living Wage by law, and even a generous pension does nothing for a person's standard of living now, which is what the Living Wage is all about)

A 3.6% annual bonus, equivalent to an extra 22p an hour (but this is not payable for another four years so again has no impact on day to day living)

A 10% discount card for products at Tesco.

...and that's it.

But let's be generous to Tesco here. What if the money from such benefits were available now? The 11% pension contribution and 3.6% annual bonus would only bring a cleaners salary up to an "equivalent" £7.09 an hour. This means that if you are employed full time (35 hours a week) you'd have to make up the shortfall through the benefit of the discount card. That means spending £511 each week at Tesco in order to get the extra £51.11 benefit via the 10% discount.

Quite where Tesco they expect someone on the minimum wage to get £511 each week to spend at Tesco isn't, as yet, clear.



In the interests of transparency and fairness, here is the email from Matt in full:

Jon,

I hope you are well. As promised I’ve put below some detail on our pay. It demonstrates that our employees receive a good and fair salary, and why we are proud of our employment credentials.

Before that, however, I would like you to understand our perspective on this issue, and I hope that you respond with balance in the piece which you do publish. By engaging on this topic, we are being brought publically into an issue on which we compare very favourably against our competitors.

I would ask, therefore, that you do not cherry pick the information from this email, but rather report holistically on our employment credentials.

Firstly, our base rate of pay is the best in the industry. Ranging from 4.5% to 12.5% more (averaging 7% higher), we reward our staff with better pay than M&S, Iceland, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrison, Waitrose and Coop.

In 2010 we increased our under 18 pay to match adult pay.

We have the best benefits package in the industry. As you will know, statutory pension employer contribution is currently 1%, rising to 3% when auto-enrolment (workplace pensions) comes into full effect - our pension contribution is 11%. We consistently win awards for our pensions package, which is the one of only 4 defined benefits pension schemes in the Ftse 100. In fact, in September this year we won the top accolade at the Pension Scheme of the Year awards.

We provide a 10% staff discount card, and this year all UK staff were awarded a bonus of 3.6% of salary to be paid in cash from 2015, provided they are still working for Tesco.

We have an industry-leading partnership with USDAW. In fact, USDAW said that as a business, Tesco ‘offers some of the best terms and conditions (including pay) for its staff.’

I hope you can see that we have strong employment credentials. Not only do we employ more people than any other private sector employer, we also pay the most of the retailers and have the best benefits package. I would argue that we do pay equivalent to the living wage when viewed in its entirety, are the certainly the closest retailer to paying it in base pay alone.

Matt

Tesco say they won't pay London Living Wage at new Streatham store

At last night's public meeting at the Hideaway regarding the progress on the Tesco Hub development, the representative from the supermarket talked about the new jobs it hoped would come to the area as a result of the 24 hour mega-store.

What the net effect will be on employment remains to be seen (there are major concerns that small business on the High Road will suffer further as a result of the competition, as well as employment at other local supermarkets). Certainly, research by the NEF suggests that big chain stores take money out of the local economy.

I got the opportunity to ask about the quality of the new jobs, and specifically whether employees and contractors would be paid the London Living Wage. This is the minimum income considered necessary for a worker to meet basic needs (for an extended period of time or for a lifetime). It is set by the Greater London Authority, and currently stands at £8.55 an hour.

This is of particular interest as we got Lambeth Council to commit to pay the Living Wage to its employees (and finally this year contractors too). But we also discovered that Lambeth had failed to get any reassurances from Tesco in Streatham. This is of particular concern given Tesco's track employment track record of low pay for its workers.

When I asked Tesco last night whether it would commit to paying the London Living Wage it said it would not. What it said however was that the benefits and perks that employees received were "equivalent" to the London Living Wage - in particular its "bonus" scheme for employees.

I have asked Matthew Magee, (@TescoLondon) Regional Corporate Affairs Manager for Tesco, for details about how they calculate this and reach this conclusion. I will update this blog when I receive a response.

However some investigation reveals that the typical bonuses that are given to the lowest paid employees are in the region of £100 a year. For a cleaner on the minimum wage working full time, this equates to around an extra 5p an hour. But that is not the end of the story. The bonus is not earned until an employee has worked there for a year, and even then, the money cannot be accessed for five years. This is in no way equivalent to a London Living Wage. (As an aside, Staff annual turnover at Tesco tends to be around 30%).

Pension contributions can't be considered either as making up an "equivalent" to the Living Wage, as these are a statutory responsibility paid to those on the Living Wage, and are considered in addition to the way the Living Wage is calculated.

So it is very hard to see how this claim by Tesco can be substantiated. When I receive their figures, I will reproduce them below.