The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has criticised football clubs for not paying their employees the living wage.
In a post on his Facebook page, which argued for a “reality check” on inequality in Britain, Miliband wrote:
This weekend, many people will be going to football matches where the stars are paid six-figure sums every week, but those who work at the stadium are often paid significantly less than the living wage.
There are some clubs, like Chelsea in London and Hearts in Edinburgh, that have become accredited living wage employers. However many other football clubs including some of the giants of the Premier League have not.
The Labour leader said that as well as raising the national minimum wage he believed government could do more to encourage employers to pay the living wage, which is currently deemed to be £7.85 an hour or £9.15 an hour in London.
He said that a chief executive in a FTSE 100 company now earns on average 130 times more than their average employee and 300 times more than the living wage.
He said the living wage was “needed for people doing some of the hardest jobs in our country to have dignity when they go home from work” and that “firms that can afford to pay multi-million pound salaries at the top need to explain why they will not pay the living wage to those at the bottom.”
The post was timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss global inequality. Miliband said that, although the discussions were welcome, “it is answers which are overdue”.
The Labour leader singled out the banking industry, including Barclays and Goldman Sachs, as having set an example on paying the living wage to their lowest-paid workers, although he said it was “not an industry [he has] always praised”.
“More needs to be done in sectors like law and accountancy which are estimated to have more than 1,000 employees paid upwards of £1m a year – but cleaners, security guards and caterers who take care of them at work often struggle to make ends meet at home,” he added.
Miliband said a Labour government would introduce a tax rebate for employers that signed up to become living wage employers in the first year of the next parliament, and that they would require companies to publish the ratio of the pay of their top earner compared to the average employee.
