{"id":18142,"date":"2019-05-30T16:01:42","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T15:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unitelive.org\/?p=18142"},"modified":"2020-11-12T12:56:27","modified_gmt":"2020-11-12T12:56:27","slug":"low-paid-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/?p=18142","title":{"rendered":"‘We must be bolder’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A rising minimum wage has taken a record number of people out of low pay, but Unite has warned that more must be done to support families who are struggling to get by.<\/p>\n

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A report from the Resolution Foundation<\/a> think tank has found that the number of low-paid workers in Britain fell last year by 200,000 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c more than half of these were women. The sectors with the largest fall in low pay were administrative and support services and retail, with 110,000 workers escaping low pay in 2018.<\/p>\n

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The think tank singled out the rebranded minimum wage, known as the National Living Wage (NLW), as the driving force behind the recent falls in the number of low paid workers. Since the NLW was first introduced in 2016, low-pay Britain accounts for 17 per cent of the total workforce, down from just over 20 per cent in 2015.<\/p>\n

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Now, the proportion of low-paid workers, who are defined as earning less than two-thirds of median wages, has fallen to its lowest level since 1980.<\/p>\n

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The figures prompted the Resolution Foundation to predict that, as long as the minimum wage continues to rise, low pay in Britain could be eliminated altogether by the mid-2020s.<\/p>\n

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Unite welcomed the news but cautioned that a rise in the minimum wage as an hourly rate hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily translated to a rise in people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s weekly take home pay \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in fact there is now a gap between weekly and hour wage growth<\/a>. \u00c2\u00a0This is down to the fact that people entering the labour market are working fewer hours, many of whom may be in insecure work such as on zero hours contracts.<\/p>\n

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The Tory government has pledged to continue hiking the NLW significantly each year until 2020, while the Labour party has gone one step further and called for a Real Living Wage, which is pegged to the real cost of living and not median earnings.<\/p>\n

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But Unite believes that hiking the minimum wage can only be part of the solution to ensure families don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fall through the cracks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c especially in light of the fact that, for example, child poverty is rising even as low pay has fallen.<\/p>\n

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This was a point highlighted by the Resolution Foundation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Torsten Bell, who said in an interview with BBC Radio 4 Today<\/a> that part of the reason child poverty was up was \u00e2\u20ac\u015bbecause we are cutting benefits which go disproportionately to families with children\u00e2\u20ac\u0165.<\/p>\n

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‘North-South divide’<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Resolution Foundation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s findings on the minimum wage come as a new scathing report uncovers the extent of the economic divide between London and the North.<\/a><\/p>\n

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The ground-breaking report, carried out by Lord Bob Kerslake, found stark regional inequalities in a range of key measures, from social mobility to income levels to life expectancy and more.<\/p>\n

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A linked analysis from the Manchester Evening News<\/em><\/a> found that even children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s oral health \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which is a key indicator of poverty \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is significantly worse outside of London and the South. The five worst places for oral health were all in the North West of England \u00e2\u20ac\u201c with 40 per cent of five-year olds in Rochdale, Salford, Manchester, Blackburn and Knowsley showing signs of tooth decay.<\/p>\n

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The North-South divide is so bad that it prompted Lord Kerslake, former head of the civil service, to compare the UK to Germany at the end of the Cold War.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u015bA huge gulf exists between the UK\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s best-performing regions and towns,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 Lord Kerslake noted, which he said made the UK \u00e2\u20ac\u0098one of the most regionally unbalanced countries in the industrialised world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n

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Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner said that while it was welcome that a hike in the minimum wage has taken a record number of people out of low pay, he argued that there are still millions of households who cannot make ends meet.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u015bAfter a decade of crippling austerity, wage stagnation and skyrocketing living costs, poverty is still blighting the lives of far too many people,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 Turner noted.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u015bWe must be bolder than merely increasing the minimum wage incrementally every year — the minimum wage should be hiked to at least \u00c2\u014110 an hour now, so that it reflects and is in the future linked to the real cost of living,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u015bMinimum wage enforcement must be strengthened and funded as well \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it is a national scandal that we have only nine enforcement officers to cover 18,000 employment agencies.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u015bWe must reverse the damage austerity has wrought by investing in our public services and communities equitably throughout the UK, not just in London or the South — creating jobs and stimulating our economy so that prosperity is shared by all. And most importantly, we need stronger unions with the return of sector level collective bargaining to ensure low pay is banished from this country once and for all.\u00e2\u20ac\u0165<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A rising minimum wage has taken a record number of people out of low pay, but Unite has warned that more must be done to support families who are struggling to get by.   A report from the Resolution Foundation think tank has found that the number of low-paid workers in Britain fell last year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6784,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"wps_subtitle":"Unite welcomes fall in number of low-paid workers but says more must be done","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25245,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18142\/revisions\/25245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}