Credit to Chelsea....

[DubaiSpur]

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/dec/11/chelsea-england-living-wage

David Conn

Chelsea, owned by Roman Abramovich, have become the first Premier League club in England to be accredited employers paying a living wage to all their staff. Supporter-owned FC United of Manchester became the first football club in Britain to be an accredited living wage employer in October, and Hearts, in Scotland, signed up to the initiative this week.

Luton Town, of League Two, also committed this week to gaining the accreditation, which requires employers to pay a living wage to all staff, including those working for companies contracted to supply services. That is a high proportion of football clubs’ workers because most matchday staff, including stewards and people working in stadium catering operations, are employed by service companies.

The living wage of £7.85 per hour, £9.15 per hour in London, is assessed by Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Social Policy, for the campaign body Citizens UK, as the minimum needed for people to provide for themselves and a family. The legal minimum wage set by the government is substantially lower: £6.50 per hour for adults, £5.13 for 18-20-year-olds and £3.79 per hour for those under-18, with no London weighting.

Gillian Owen, of Citizens UK, said Chelsea have worked through all contracts, including for workers in the hotel at Stamford Bridge, and reached a firm commitment that all staff will be paid the living wage, by 2017 if current contracts are in force until then.

“We believe football clubs are beacon employers with a history rooted in their communities, which still do brilliant community work, but they are sustaining this low pay, which is really tough,” Owen said. Citizens UK believes football clubs paying only minimum wages to workers is particularly unjust given the multimillion-pound salaries paid to individual players.

A group of Emirates Marketing Project supporters delivered a letter to the club addressed to the chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, calling on the club to become an accredited living wage employer. The letter, which congratulates City on this week’s opening of the new academy and its investment on and off the pitch and in the local community, argues that paying all staff a living wage would “complete the excellent work the club is doing.”

Christopher Fabby, one of the supporters who delivered the letter, said football clubs could set an example to other employers, not to seek profits partly due to low wages. “Paying the living wage would fit perfectly with the good work City are doing,” Fabby said. “We asked them to give that commitment, and set a date for it.”

City are committed to paying employed staff the living wage, but Owen said that in the modern economy, contracted out workers most commonly suffer low pay. City say they are pressing contract companies to pay their staff a living wage, but the club has not yet insisted on this or been through the accreditation process.

None of the other 18 Premier League club are understood to have committed even to paying their own employed staff the living wage.




I'd dearly like to see us do this, you know. Any thoughts on the feasibility of this proposal?

 

[LutonSpurs]

Big props to my home town team Luton for doing it first. But yeah. Credit to Chelsea.

 

[Craig_J]

Fair play to them but you do have to wonder why a living wage isn't set in law anyway. The whole purpose of the minimum wage should be to ensure that people can actually live of it.

 

[DubaiSpur]

Fair play to them but you do have to wonder why a living wage isn't set in law anyway. The whole purpose of the minimum wage should be to ensure that people can actually live of it.

The minimum wage itself is reviewed on a semi-regular basis by the Low Pay Commission, and has risen steadily from its original amount over the past decade or so. However, there is definitely a case to be made for the argument that it hasn't risen quickly enough to account for the concurrent rapid rises in the cost of living. In the absence of the LPC actually taking into account this disparity, the living wage seems like a decent solution, and I'd like to see more companies across the board pick it up.

 

[Danishfurniturelover]

The minimum wage itself is reviewed on a semi-regular basis by the Low Pay Commission, and has risen steadily from its original amount over the past decade or so. However, there is definitely a case to be made for the argument that it hasn't risen quickly enough to account for the concurrent rapid rises in the cost of living. In the absence of the LPC actually taking into account this disparity, the living wage seems like a decent solution, and I'd like to see more companies across the board pick it up.

woopie Chelsea pay their cleaners and kitchen porters £7.80 an hour, now I no longer think they are a scum bag club. I mean giving just one first team player a weeks fine when they act like a cnut(often) would pay for all their staff to be on this wage.

 

[DubaiSpur]

woopie Chelsea pay their cleaners and kitchen porters £7.80 an hour, now I no longer think they are a scum bag club. I mean giving just one first team player a weeks fine when they act like a cnut(often) would pay for all their staff to be on this wage.

True, it's not overly expensive for PL football clubs. Which is why I want our club to do it too. And the reason I'm giving credit to Chelsea for this is because, regardless of how cheap it is to them, they are now the first PL club to have adopted this policy. That's worth some credit, if only to give some prominence to this issue and compel other clubs into acting on it.

 

[Modric THFC]

Here is the problem for us
"the accreditation, which requires employers to pay a living wage to all staff, including those working for companies contracted to supply services."

This could be a huge issue for companies putting in a tender for anything related to the new stadium.

Also the living wage of so much an hour isn't great if your job at the football club is part time and only when there is a home game.

Those people working on match days are still gonna be living in poverty. But it's great PR.

 

[scaramanga]

Fair play to them but you do have to wonder why a living wage isn't set in law anyway. The whole purpose of the minimum wage should be to ensure that people can actually live of it.

It's just a made up figure by union types who want their members (in both senses of the word) to be paid more so that they can increase their subs.

 

[Danishfurniturelover]

True, it's not overly expensive for PL football clubs. Which is why I want our club to do it too. And the reason I'm giving credit to Chelsea for this is because, regardless of how cheap it is to them, they are now the first PL club to have adopted this policy. That's worth some credit, if only to give some prominence to this issue and compel other clubs into acting on it.

I see your point, personally I could never utter the words "credit to Chelsea" despite being to the right of the political spectrum though on some issues I am most certainly the liberal. All that aside I am all for paying people that are prepared to get and go to work a living wage so agree with this move.

I know a couple of people at Brighton and Hove Albion and they pay the living wage and offer other medical benefits to all staff after they have served a year for the club. For me anyone who gets up and goes out to work every day is ok by me and I do not care what they are doing they should be paid a living wage. So yes I back the move and would like it to become law. With an election coming up I imagine all parties will start talking about it not that any of them would do anything when in power.

 

[jts1882]

The living wage discussion should be combined with that on working benefits. If a job don't pay enough for someone to live on and the government is paying some form of income support, then government is subsidising the job. Do we really want to be subsidising this type of job, especially when they are at multinationals that evade taxes. A real living wage only makes sense if it means income support for the low paid can be abolished. Some of the money saved on the latter could be used to encourage (subsidise) small and local companies. This makes more sense than subsiding Cappuccinos and Starbucks.

 

[DubaiSpur]

Here is the problem for us
"the accreditation, which requires employers to pay a living wage to all staff, including those working for companies contracted to supply services."

This could be a huge issue for companies putting in a tender for anything related to the new stadium.

Also the living wage of so much an hour isn't great if your job at the football club is part time and only when there is a home game.

Those people working on match days are still gonna be living in poverty. But it's great PR.

Well, Chelsea have apparently committed to a living wage for all workers and contractors' workers by 2017 - it isn't hard to imagine us committing to the same thing by, say, 2019, when the majority of the build will have been completed and (presumably) paid for. We could unroll the initiative in stages: doesn't have to be exactly like Chelsea's unveiling of the scheme.

And yes, part-time workers will still get the thin end of the wedge when it comes to hourly pay, but that's a broader issue that requires more societal consensus to deal with. Right now, we can only do what is within our power: and a living wage for full-time workers in an age of multi-million pound footballers is definitely within THFC's reach.

I see your point, personally I could never utter the words "credit to Chelsea" despite being to the right of the political spectrum though on some issues I am most certainly the liberal. All that aside I am all for paying people that are prepared to get and go to work a living wage so agree with this move.

I know a couple of people at Brighton and Hove Albion and they pay the living wage and offer other medical benefits to all staff after they have served a year for the club. For me anyone who gets up and goes out to work every day is ok by me and I do not care what they are doing they should be paid a living wage. So yes I back the move and would like it to become law. With an election coming up I imagine all parties will start talking about it not that any of them would do anything when in power.

Essentially this. People are putting in eight or more hours of honest work per day, but the cost of living has risen to a level that often leaves them struggling to pay for essentials on the minimum wage. That's enormously unfair to the people at the lower end of our societal pay scales, who choose to work yet find themselves poorly rewarded for making that choice. I'd like to see that change, and I want my club to be one of the companies pushing for that change to happen.

I believe Ed has talked about raising the minimum wage to 8 quid an hour by 2020, but I'm not convinced: that's actually a slower rate of increase than the one achieved from 1999 to 2014, and about par for a six-year period taken from within that fifteen-year timescale. In other words, he basically proposed letting the minimum wage rise at slightly slower levels than it has already been rising to 8 pounds by 2020, hardly ambitious or a genuine attempt to ease the burgeoning cost of living crisis in the country.

The living wage discussion should be combined with that on working benefits. If a job don't pay enough for someone to live on and the government is paying some form of income support, then government is subsidising the job. Do we really want to be subsidising this type of job, especially when they are at multinationals that evade taxes. A real living wage only makes sense if it means income support for the low paid can be abolished. Some of the money saved on the latter could be used to encourage (subsidise) small and local companies. This makes more sense than subsiding Cappuccinos and Starbucks.

Let's try small steps first. I agree with the overall picture: we should be encouraging SMEs and not excessively subsidizing the larger corporations already present in the country to the extent that they can get away with paying workers less in the expectation that the government will pick up the slack. But let's focus on what we can do, as a club: what THFC can do. Again, a broad societal consensus is required for wide-ranging measures like reforming working benefits and toughening up the UK's tax structure (or, alternatively, abolishing corporate tax, if you're so inclined), but asking for our club to follow what Chelsea have now done and place itself at the forefront of company-led support for a living wage system is within our reach, and is something we should be looking for our club to do.

 

[Lemonade Money]

**** Chelsea.