Winning a Living Wage: The Legacy of Living Wage Campaigns

There is perhaps no more current high-profile campaign relating to low-paid workers in the UK than the living wage campaign. Since its launch by a broad-based community organisation in 2001, the campaign has secured more than £200m as additional wages to some of society’s most insecure and poorly paid workers.1 This has led to higher tax receipts and savings in in-work benefits. A recent report estimated that net savings to the Treasury from the introduction of the living wage across the UK would be approximately £3.6bn (Lawton and Pennycook, 2013). Campaigns have been led by community organisations, trade unions, student unions and political parties and ‘wins’ have been secured across the economy in banking and financial services, healthcare, cleaning, hospitality and catering, and latterly retail. Unusually for campaigns of this kind, they enjoy cross-party support. Their success is all the more remarkable given long-term trends towards outsourcing in managerial and organisational practice and the onset in 2008 of the deepest recent global recession. Commentators have accounted for this success in terms of new organisational models adopted by trade unions and community organisations (Wills, 2008; Holgate, 2009; Hearn and Bergos, 2011), particularly highlighting the success of the latter in mobilising communities and non-typical actors in these campaigns.