Women's Views on News |
| Looking at living wages before dividends Posted: 04 Mar 2015 06:43 AM PST
There are many groups who gain when a company makes a profit. You and I may gain via the public purse by the corporation tax paid to the Treasury, the directors will usually gain with high salaries and sometimes bonuses or share options, shareholders will gain by taking a dividend on their shareholding. But one group who don't usually gain are the company's staff, paid below the living wage who actually worked to make that profit in the first place. Let's look at those groups in turn. 1. First the public purse. Now it is true that most companies (except those globally structured to minimise UK tax) pay corporation tax on profits, and we should all benefit from those taxes to fund our schools and hospitals. However, if workers in that company are paid below a living wage, most of them have to claim tax credits to be able to make ends meet. Those tax credits are funded by the taxpayer, by me and you, by the public purse. So in effect the public purse is just subsidising the company's staff costs and maybe you and I don't gain from company profits at all. 2. Directors and senior staff. Well yes I believe they probably do gain when the company they work for makes a profit as there is often a bonus system or, in my experience, your career progression at senior management level is nearly always linked to company profit. So ok the senior staff are doing fine. 3. Shareholders. Some of the best employers have schemes where all of their staff hold shares, however what I want to look at here are external shareholders. These are investors who have no real involvement in the company, but have just bought some shares and are waiting for their dividend payments. Currently the law says that a dividend can only be paid to shareholders if a company has made enough profit. The company cannot pay out more in dividends than there is available profits. That means the lower the overheads such as staff costs the higher the profit and the higher the dividend. So the shareholders are doing nicely. 4. Staff on Minimum Wage. As set out in point 1 most workers on minimum wage, although working for a living, are not able to live on that wage and have to claim benefits such as tax credits. No matter how hard they work to increase productivity and profit they don't gain. So we have a situation that a company can pay poverty pay rates and have a higher profit margin which is then paid out to the shareholders. Meanwhile the rest of us are subsidising not only the company but the shareholder by propping up the poverty pay of the workforce. There are the very people whose work make the company profitable in the first place. That is madness. This is why I believe that we should look at the current law around dividends. I propose that before a profit making company makes a pay-out in dividends to shareholders it must commit to paying the Living Wage to its workforce. It cannot be right that passive shareholders take their cut whilst the workers who made the profit have to rely on the benefit system which the taxpayer pays for. If you want to invest in a company, then surely it's right that you invest in its workforce, and don't expect a state subsidy of staffing costs. Ok, I know people will say "but investors will sell their shares if they don't get good dividends and what about the pension funds invested in shares in PLCs?" Well my answer to that is surely a sound solid investment is one based on sustainability, and a company that invests in its workers and treats them fairly is far more likely to grow and grow than one that just focuses solely on short term profits. I personally think that profitable employers who say they can't afford to pay living wages or who depend on cheap labour are not the business model we should be investing in and building the recovery on. I am just throwing the idea of Living Wage before Dividends out there to start a proper, clear, informed discussion about this and the public needs to understand the level to which these companies and shareholders are helped by public funds. It's often said that asking employers to pay the Living Wage in times of austerity is unworkable but I think if you can pay out a dividend to a shareholder but not pay a decent wage to the person who helped make the profit then that is unethical and we should consider doing something about it. A version of this article appeared on LabourList’s website on 2 March.  |
| Women leaders issue call to action Posted: 04 Mar 2015 06:38 AM PST
Global women leaders have urged governments and the private sector to take stronger measures to close the gap of inequalities in order to achieve the goals established 20 years ago during the Fourth World Conference on Women that resulted in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. They had gathered at a high-level event, "Women in power and decision-making: Building a different world," held in Santiago, Chile, last month. After two days of intense analysis on the progress made since the adoption of the Platform for Action by 189 countries in 1995, the global women leaders determined that progress has been slow and uneven. No country has yet achieved gender equality in all areas of public and private life, and significant inequalities persist between women and men. According to the introduction of the Call to Action document generated by the conference: "at the current pace of change, it will take 81 years to achieve gender parity in the workplace, more than 75 years to reach equal remuneration between men and women for work of equal value, and more than 30 years to reach gender balance in decision-making." The Call to Action declares 2015 a momentous year for gender equality and women's empowerment, even though commitments to achieve gender balance in leadership positions have not been met. "Women and men are called to advance much more than what we have achieved so far," Michelle Bachelet, former head of UN Women, now the president of Chile, said, during her closing address. "Women and men are called to speed up the changes to achieve full equality, not in seven or eight decades, but sooner. "We have a commitment with the new generation and to ensure that girls that are being born will not endure a lifetime of discrimination. Adding to Bachelet's remarks, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon emphasised that the world will never fulfil one hundred per cent of the world potential by excluding fifty per cent of the world's population. "This Call to Action is loud and clear, and today we say to the world: you cannot ignore this call, you must answer: we have waited long enough," he said. "Now is the time to take a stand to close gaps, to remove obstacles, to invest in women and girls, to move from words to action, not next year, not tomorrow, right now." Making reference to the venue where the event took place, Estación Mapocho, a railway station that was refitted as a cultural centre in 1994 and now used to host many kinds of events, UN Women's executive director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcukca said: "We are here in a station that has been repurposed to serve a new purpose. "We are here to repurpose ourselves so that we can serve a stronger propose. In stations people meet: we meet as friends and as colleagues. "In stations people go in different directions to serve other purposes and this is what we're going to do: a stronger and more determined purpose for gender equality." The Call to Action focuses on three specific actions: Renewed political commitment to close remaining gaps and fully implement the 12 critical areas of the Beijing Platform for Action by 2020; The empowerment of women, the realization of human rights of women and girls, and the expiry of gender inequality by 2030; and An end to the funding gap on gender equality, and the matching of commitments with the means of implementation. To read the Call to Action, click here.  |
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