Pay more to ease benefits
TODAY a range of companies have been named and shamed for paying their employees below the minimum wage.
Some of these companies are household names and claim admin error. Some are household names with owners who couldn’t care less about the poverty of their employees while they enjoy their riches in whatever tax haven they choose to inhabit.
But in a year when the austerity programme started in 2010 by Messrs Cameron and Osborne, has been highlighted as putting so many families and notably children into poverty in such a rich nation would it not be better to prevent so many “admin errors” with the accompanying shaming and bad PR.
If companies with any kind of conscience or humanity determined that the lowest hourly rate they would pay would be at least say £12.50 an hour - so a couple of pounds above the minimum. It would avoid any potential future embarrassment, it would be an uplift for those on the lowest pay and would also make a small reduction in the benefits bill. It might even take some out of benefits.
Everyone who is entitled to claim Universal Credit with its benefits cap is trapped in that cycle of poverty with today’s high rents and utility bills. Food prices have risen this year and with the additional bureaucracy of exiting the EU will rise further in 2021 as companies costs rise. There are millions of children now living in poverty thanks to 10 years of austerity highlighted by this pandemic. It has taken a footballer (Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford) to put it into the spotlight. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and The Trussell Trust have been reporting this for years.
We as taxpayers are effectively subsidising the payroll of companies through the benefits system. Companies who concentrate on pay for the boardroom and the Senior Management Team and focus on paying the lowest pay possible to the rest of the workforce.
Would it not be wonderful in 2021 to see the Stock Exchange focus not on the drive for greater profit but on ethical issues, environmental issues, corporate social responsibility.
Let’s see a levelling up in the boardroom on not just gender and BAME issues but of welfare and pay for their lowest paid. Let’s see a reduction not a growth in foodbanks. Let’s see an end to homelessness.
Finally instead of clapping for carers let’s see them treated with dignity and professionally along with the rest of the NHS and fund the care for the elderly and their diseases properly - after all we are now £350million a week better off! Lynne Buckinham