Supermarkets - Pay Your Staff the Living Wage

The 'big four' supermarkets: Asda, Morrisons, Tesco and Sainsburys do not pay the Living Wage. These companies employ around 900,000 people meaning that together they employ the second largest number of people in the UK after the NHS.

The Living Wage is “the threshold at which people can live above the poverty level with a sufficient safety net to provide for quality of life”.

We need to ask these supermarkets to pay their staff the living wage. Big companies don’t like bad publicity. 38 Degrees members put pressure on the Olympic sponsors who were dodging their tax in the summer, and they caved to public pressure. We need to shame them into paying their staff a wage which affords them dignity and shows that they’re worth more than the legal minimum.

Sign this petition to show the CEOs that you think they should pay their staff a wage they can live on! Together we can work together to lift people out of poverty.

These supermarkets can afford it! The salaries paid to their CEOs are evidence of this. Justin King, the CEO of Sainsburys, receives £3.2 million a year; Philip Clarke of Tesco, £6.9 million; Dalton Philips of Morrisons, £4 million; Andy Clarke of Asda's pay is not in the public domain. If they can afford to pay their bosses this much, they can afford to pay their staff a few pounds more an hour.

Tesco announced sales of more than £1 billion a week and annual profits of more than £3 billion despite the impact of the global downturn. Sainsburys opened five supermarkets, 28 convenience stores and two extensions, adding 267,000 square feet to its estate over the last three months. If they can afford to expand to at this rate, they can afford to pay their staff more.

The Living Wage is beneficial to employees, employers and taxpayers. It prevents working poverty and the exploitation of low-paid workers. Taxpayers top up the low wages of supermarket workers by £50 a week in tax credits. If all low paid workers earned the living wage, the government could save £823 million a year by decreasing welfare benefits.

It’s not just those who are unemployed who are in poverty, it’s also those in work who just don’t earn enough money to pay for the basics. One-fifth of women and one-seventh of men earn less than £7 per hour. More than six million working adults in Britain are living in poverty.

Since the beginning of the Living Wage campaign in 2001 led by Citizens UK, they have lifted 45,000 people out of poverty and put over £210 million into the pockets of some of the lowest paid workers in the UK.

*UPDATE* I have made a short link if you'd like to share the petition on Twitter: It is
http://bit.ly/Big4LW745