This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
MAYOR OF LONDON Sadiq Khan has been urged to support striking workers who help the city’s homeless.
St Mungo’s staff held a demonstration outside City Hall yesterday as their month-long strike entered its second week.
The workers and Unite union have now called on the mayor to intervene in the ongoing pay dispute.
Unite says that the value of their pay has plummeted by 25 per cent over the last decade while managers’ pay has soared by 350 per cent.
General secretary Sharon Graham said: “Unite members at St Mungo’s are on the front line fighting for the homeless.
“But the mayor’s generous funding for rough sleeping services is not being fairly shared with the very workers who deliver these crucial services for the city.
“Low pay means St Mungo’s workers are at risk of losing their own homes. Imagine that! A homeless charity confronting its own workers with ending up on the street themselves.
“So today we are calling on Sadiq Khan to intervene and call St Mungo’s management to account and demand they be paid a decent wage.”
St Mungo’s workers are to mount picket lines outside its head office in Tower Hill in London and in Brighton, Bristol and Oxford from May 30 until June 26.
The union said that the industrial action was over the charity’s “pitiful” pay offer of 2.25 per cent made in April.
It added the imposition of “poverty wages” had left “many” of its workers in fear of being unable to pay their rents and mortgages, with front-line workers taking home less than £20,000 a year after taxes and deductions.
City Hall this year gave an extra £2 million in grants to the charity whose annual audits revealed a cash balance of some £22m in the past two years, said Unite.
St Mungo’s chief executive Emma Haddad said: “Our latest offer, combined with the annual pay rise proposed by the National Joint Council, would have meant a pay rise of at least 10 per cent for those colleagues on the lowest salaries. This is what Unite has been asking for but voted against it.
“We believe our new offer was fair and appropriate. My door remains open to Unite, every day during the strike.”
The Mayor’s Office has been contacted for comment.
