Living Wage Week 2022
14/11/2022
By Lee Nottle
Essential Trading is proud to be an accredited Living Wage Foundation employer; we pay a real living wage, not just the national living wage, which unfortunately doesn’t fully recognise the financial instability currently facing many UK citizens.
What is the Living Wage Foundation?
The Living Wage campaign is an independent movement of businesses, organisations and people who believe a hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay. Employers choose to pay the real Living Wage on a voluntary basis - it provides an ethical benchmark for responsible pay. The idea for a Living Wage was born 20 years ago at a meeting in East London. Citizens UK brought together churches, mosques, schools and other local institutions to talk about the issues affecting their communities. One issue came up again and again – low pay and the struggle to make ends meet. It often meant two jobs and no time for community and family life. From that meeting, a powerful movement of faith leaders, trade unions and community organisations came together to call on major employers in the capital to pay their staff a London Living Wage.
10 years later, in 2011, the movement went national and the first UK Living Wage rate was launched. The Living Wage Foundation was established to recognise and celebrate the businesses that choose to go further than the government minimum and is an example of how civil society, businesses and organisations can work together to tackle in-work poverty. It enjoys cross party support with public backing from successive Metropolitan Mayors and MPs across the UK, including First Ministers in Wales and Scotland.
How is it different to the National Minimum Wage?
The real Living Wage is independently calculated based on what employees and their families need to live. This is why it’s higher than the government minimum wage. Employers voluntarily choose to pay it and it applies to all workers over 18 years old, recognising that young people have the same living costs as everyone else. The campaign for a real Living Wage has now delivered more than £1.5billion in extra wages to workers since it began in 2001 and the movement has lifted over 260,000 people out of in-work poverty. The pandemic has hit the poorest the hardest and, as we now enter what is predicted to be the UK's longest recession, the Living Wage is more important now than ever.
So what’s Living Wage Week all about?
Well, Living Wage Week is the annual celebration of the Living Wage movement and takes place from the 14th -20th November 2022. The Living Wage movement is now over 20 years old and over 11,000 employers are now part of the movement with over £2 billion going back into workers pockets since it began. Essential are proud to be an accredited Living Wage Employer celebrating Living Wage Week. Join us in celebrating the movement that’s given hundreds of thousands of workers a pay rise with a real Living Wage.
Click here to become a Living Wage Employer