Living Wage

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) on running an excellent campaign over many months and bringing to light a significant problem. I think the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry) is well intentioned, but he is perhaps a little over-optimistic about how easy it is for people to get into conflict with their employers, especially now that tribunal fees have been increased. My hon. Friend motivated me to find out what is going on in my constituency. I have heard stories very similar to those that she told about Marks & Sparks and B&Q from the GMB trade union with respect to Asda, but the story that shocked me most was what is going on at Morrisons.

Morrisons made an increase to its basic hourly rate of £1.27, taking the figure from £6.93 to £8.20. A person working 20 hours mid-week would therefore appear to gain £25.40 a week, or more than £1,000 a year. To pay for that, however, paid breaks became unpaid, at a cost of £2.05 for each break lost. Morrisons also abolished the Sunday premium of time and a half. Instead of being paid £12.30 an hour, people received a pay cut from £10.39 to £8.20. This has had a particularly bad impact on those who regularly work weekend shifts. One of my constituents gained a miserly £1.64 a week from these changes. Their partner told me that this had caused a lot of “heartache”—that was the word she used. One very unpleasant aspect of this, of course, is that it sets workers against each other. One person’s pay rise is literally at the expense of another person’s pay cut. It is not necessary, because the people I have spoken to who work for the Co-op have not been treated in this way.

Morrisons no doubt told its employees that this was all that it could afford, so hon. Members will imagine my astonishment at a parallel development in my constituency. They might know that I have an extremely large constituency of 300 square miles, with very contrasting communities at either end. At the same time as Morrisons was cutting the pay of its Sunday workers, William Morrison was buying a castle at the other end of my constituency for more than £3 million.

When most of us buy a house, we haggle to get the price down—not Mr Morrison. He saw the advertisement for the castle, priced at £3 million, in Country Life. He was so keen to have it that he offered a quarter of a million pounds more. As is recorded by the Land Registry, he paid £3.24 million. The increase is more than enough to buy a family house in my constituency. Of course people are free to spend their money as they like, but I am afraid that this paints a picture of modern capitalism that is ugly and exploitative. I am not sure what his great grandfather would have made of all this, but there seems to be something very Victorian about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.

The Morrison family shareholding is now worth some £270 million. Over the past two years, the dividend payments have been 20p per share, so the family has been getting about £24 million on their shareholding. In real terms, the pay deal for Morrisons’ Sunday workers has been a cut. This inequality is not necessary. It is not efficient, it is not just and it is wrong. There is really only one word to characterise what has been going on—greed. That is why people need Labour’s real living wage, independently set and properly enforced.