London may be rich but many of its people are poor
|
Version 0 of 1. It is the start of Fair Pay Fortnight, two weeks of union-led campaigning to highlight the failure of British wages to keep up with the rising cost of living. In London, Labour MP and mayoral contender Tessa Jowell has released figures from House of Commons library researchers based on Office for National Statistics data showing that during last year 18.3% of jobs in the capital paid below the London Living Wage (LLW), with the Outer London figure rising to 25.8%. Boris Johnson has embraced the campaign for the living wage, pledging to make it the norm by 2020. Nice idea, but those percentages show that there’s a long way to go. Recent estimates suggest the actual number of jobs in the capital that don’t pay up to the mark is 640,000 at least. The worst paid jobs in London’s economy are concentrated in cleaning, retail, hospitality and catering and social care, with women and part-time workers predominating. These people’s labour matters. As Liberal Democrat AM Stephen Knight put it last year when he was chair of the London Assembly’s economy committee: “A functioning city is dependent on workers from these sectors to meet our basic needs”. His successor as chair, the Green Party’s Jenny Jones, has taken the message to Oxford Street. There has been some high profile progress. Recently, Premier League football clubs Chelsea and West Ham have signed up as living wage employers. Yet the committee’s report showed that the proportion of low paid jobs in those four worst-paying occupations had increased significantly since the late 1990s. It also pointed out that low pay contributes to poverty in London, a category into which over two million Londoners fall out of a population of 8.6 million. Over half of those two million live in households where at least one person has a job, according to the London Poverty Profile. The committee report was supported by research by senior Greater London Authority economist Jonathan Hoffman. This showed, among much else, that cleaners are the most likely to be low paid - defined as below the 20th percentile point in the pay range distribution for all London employees - with rates between 75% and 85%. It also found that from 2003 to 2005, median hourly pay in catering and hospitality was above LLW levels but has been “persistently below it” since. The analysis also revealed that older employees were more likely to be in persistent low pay than younger ones. Not for the first time we may ponder the contrast between the resilient and expanding London economy hailed as leading the country out of the recession and the staggering facts that its poverty rate outstrips that of the rest of England, that seven of the 20 English local authority areas topping the child poverty league are in London and that unemployment in the Olympic boroughs of Newham and Barking and Dagenham was recently measured at 10% higher than in any of England’s other major cities. We can add to all this London School of Economics research showing that the net incomes of the poorest 10% of Londoners dropped by nearly 28% between 2007-8 and 2010, the year before the present government came to power. London is routinely called “a great city”. Not at this rate. |