Living Wage

No one that believes in having motivated and engaged people will deny that paying a decent salary which allows people to live properly is one of the basics. I personally am in favour of the living wage, however I am not in favour of Labour’s latest gimmick. It was interesting to see them roll out various people to endorse putting everyone onto the living wage but what really got my goat was that there was no attempt to consider how other workers might feel about this. For example, you put your sales assistant up to the London living wage and your supervisor suddenly finds that the sales assistant now only earns 20p an hour less than them that hardly going to be motivational is it? So what do you do? Do you pay the supervisor more? Are you even able to afford the pay rise or do you just look to make “efficiency savings”. Trust me when I tell you that I spent years trying to find ways of paying people more out of a wages budget which in real terms was subject to an annual cut and it ain’t easy.
I also don’t believe that just because you put up someone’s salary they will work harder or be any happier. Pay is part of a package which includes being treated properly, being given the opportunity for promotion, being given a range of other benefits such as staff meals and discounts as well as being given the opportunity to influence your working environment. I have always tried to motivate people through incentives and to actually measure what good looks like so that I could assess the impact of various initiatives.
So, by all means let’s pay the living wage, in fact lets pay people more than that but it has to be affordable or does Mr Milliband want a return to the days of nationalised industry when workers went on strike for improved pay and conditions even when their company was losing money (Unite, please take note)?
As usual we have politicians chasing the headlines and not even beginning to think things through – thanks Ed!