Contested Terrain: London’s Living Wage Campaign and the Tensions Between Community and Union Organising

Abstract

A few days before Christmas in 2001, shoppers in London’s busy Oxford Street were left wondering if a group of nuns had raided their piggy banks in order to buy their Christmas presents. The nuns wheeled large quantities of small change in shopping trolleys into a high street branch of HSBC bank and proceeded to block the queues as staff were kept busy by counting the coins. However, things were not as they appeared. The nuns were part of The East London Communities Organisation (Telco) and this particular action was part of a protest designed to draw attention to the fact that cleaning and security staff, contracted to work in HSBC’s shiny new building in Canary Wharf, were not paid sufficient to live in an expensive city like London. The intention of the protest was to persuade HSBC’s Chairman, Sir John Bond, to meet with Telco to discuss this issue. These community campaigners wanted HSBC’s subcontracted workers to be paid a ‘living wage’, not merely the statutory minimum wage.’ Telco argued that large multi-national companies like HSBC have a moral duty to ensure their contractors pay a wage that is sufficient for people to live on. Although at first resistant to the campaigner’s demands, HSBC finally agreed in 2004 to ensure all its contractors paid their workers a living wage, which included sick pay, access to a pension scheme and free access to a trade union.