It's 'Living Wage Week' and Workers Are Still Fighting for an Incredibly Basic Level of Pay

Happy #LivingWageWeek, everyone! Hope you've all got your discounted booze at the ready and will be performing the rites sacred to this week: paying your bills on time, having a fridge adequately stocked with economy range products, not developing severe anxiety due to poverty – that kind of thing. Living Wage Week? Scuse me, poseurs, while I give a shit about the living wage all year round.

That said, this #LivingWageWeek is particularly special, because on Monday it was announced that the living wage – as defined by the National Living Wage Foundation – has increased from £8.25 to £8.45. In London, Mayor Sadiq Kahn announced that the London Living Wage (which is higher to keep the capital's low paid workers in travel cards) has gone up from £9.40 to £9.75. This is not to be confused with the government's "National Living Wage", a savvy rebranding of the minimum wage that was launched in April this year. Confusingly, earning the National Living Wage of £7.20 still means you're technically living in poverty.

Nearly 1,000 employers in London, and 3,000 elsewhere, have been magnanimous enough to sign up to the Foundation's recommendation and agree to pay their employees enough to not be living in poverty.

But where does that leave employees for companies that haven't signed up? Outside the Ritzy Picturehouse cinema in Brixton on Monday night, workers were holding a Halloween-themed picket to protest the fact that they still don't get paid the living wage.

To get the inevitable filmic analogies out of the way early on, the Ritzy workers' strike was one of the feel-good stories of summer, 2014. The heroes were the badly paid workers who walked out 13 times over the course of the summer, demanding their bosses, independent cinema chain Picturehouse – owned by not-actually-very-independent mega-chain Cineworld (2015 post-tax profit, £83 million) – cough up. Eventually, and after a heart-in-your-mouth twist that saw them try to make 20 of their 93 stuff redundant, the bad guys had to give in. They agreed to three incremental increases, reaching £9.10 in 2016.

The victorious workers rode off into the sunset with a 26 percent pay rise that meant they were paid only marginally less than the living wage – a true Hollywood ending.

Fast-forward to now and its time for a sequel. Further progress towards a living wage has stalled. Strikes in recent weeks have caused the closure of two BFI screenings. Last night, the workers were standing around with placards and pumpkins outside the cinema – which they had managed to shut down – wearing Halloween face paint, which was kind of distracting, like trying to interview some out-of-work actor at the London Dungeon.

As Kelly Rogers, a BECTU union rep working at the cinema, told me, "We came back into negotiations in June and they said they have no intention of paying the living wage, so we came back out on strike. [The 2014 pay increase] was a massive victory at the time and everyone here is incredibly proud. But we're still not on the living wage, we still need it, we still deserve it."

To those on the picket, the rise in the living wage was welcome, but served as a reminder of just how underpaid they are at the moment. As Kelly put it, "Things like going to the doctors and getting prescriptions is stressful. You literally can't call in sick sometimes because two or three days' pay is the difference between making rent or not making rent sometimes."

It's not just a living wage they're after; they're also looking to negotiate for sick pay and maternity / paternity pay. Another striker, Kostas Georgakakis, did a decent job of explaining why this stuff matters. "Last year I got seriously ill for eight days," he said. "If you're ill for more than a week that can be very stressful. I'm expecting my first baby. We are due – three days late. I'm going to get paternity and they don't pay anything – just whatever you get from the government, which is very little money. When my wife's on maternity, we're going to be very, very tight."

A spokesperson for Picturehouse told me, "Our staff are hugely important to us, we pay fair wages and have a wide range of benefits within a good working environment. Increases in pay for front of house people in Picturehouse Cinemas have far outstripped inflation over the last three years."

The obvious question, then, is how badly paid were Picturehouse workers before those three years of far-above inflation increases if they're still paid less than the living wage?

"I think what we've shown is that people in low paid, precarious jobs can get organised, and should," said Kelly. "When we were in our negotiation meetings a few months ago they said, at times, they've wanted to put our hours down and they haven't because, in their words, 'You won't let us.'"

With the strike spreading to Hackney Picturehouse – where staff are paid even less, at £8.77 per hour – the idea seems to be catching on.

"If we get it, other cinemas can get it. If cinemas get it, maybe theatres can get it, et cetera, et cetera, and suddenly living in London is not so bitter," said Kostas.

The government's "National Living Wage" is nothing of the sort, and the real living wage remains an opt-in for employers on the nicer end of the spectrum. If we're being honest, Living Wage Week shouldn't be a thing, any more than you'd have a week celebrating our ability to breath air and drink water. For now, it remains a bitter reminder that many workers don't have something that seems like a completely basic requirement: a wage that doesn't force you to live poor.

@SimonChilds13

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