FOLLOWING a Freedom of Information request earlier this year it emerged that only seven of the 31 colleges (Queens’, Trinity, Sidney Sussex, Selwyn, Murray Edwards, Newham and St Edmunds) that make up the University of Cambridge pay their staff the £8.75 an hour judged to be the Real Living Wage when the figures were compiled in 2018.

The Real Living Wage is an independently calculated figure based upon the cost of living. It is currently £10.55 in London and £9 in other parts of the country. However, £8.75 is the benchmark figure as this was the Real Living Wage outside London when the figures were gathered in 2018. This figure is higher than the current living wage for over-25s of £ 8.21 per hour.

In fact, only Queens’ College has accreditation from the Living Wage Foundation with all its staff paid over £9 per hour. In contrast Robinson College had the worst record with 58.7 per cent of staff being paid less than £8.75 per hour.

These figures were compiled in a table based on August 2018 figures named the Taylor Table after Dr Sedley Taylor, a professor at Trinity College in 1907 who famously offered £500 to pay for the dental inspection of every school child at a council-funded school.

However, activists in Cambridge have been fighting back – primarily the student-led Cambridge University Living Wage Campaign putting pressure on all Cambridge colleges to become living wage employers, following the example of Queens’ College in 2014.

There have been calls for a specific Cambridge living wage to be adopted with monthly rent in Cambridge one-and-a-half times the English average. According to 2018 figures the average rent for a two-bedroom property is £1,288 per calendar month compared to £820 England-wide.

Campaigners argue that a Cambridge living wage would be pegged at around 95 per cent of the London living wage and therefore just over £10 per hour. Inspiration has come from Oxford which has its own living wage and employers are encouraged to pay staff more because of the high cost of living.

In a petition activists argue that there are no excuses for colleges not to pay the Real Living Wage given the large amount of money they spent “on extravagant dinners, wine ceremonies and academic prizes.”

Cambridge Labour MP Daniel Zeichner, a big supporter of the Cambridge University Living Wage Campaign, argues that there are long-term reasons why college staff have tended to receive low wages.

“The historical and long-term problem is the fragmented nature of the employment relationship, as the colleges are individual employers rather than being one system, and the lack of trade union representation.

“The college’s argument is that they give good benefits in kind. I don’t think that’s good enough frankly but there is a kind of paternalistic relationship which sometimes makes it hard to organise.”

Zeichner argues that colleges are able financially to pay their staff more and this issue is symbolic of inequality in Cambridge.

“These are wealthy institutions that continue, I would say, to not treat their staff as well as they should be in the 21st century.

“The reason we’re elected as Labour politicians in Cambridge is to try and redress that very stark divide in a very wealthy city, but for about half the city a very tough city to live in, because if you’re living in an expensive successful city it’s even harder to be poor.

“It’s a global city with lots of people coming and going and many of them will be far more familiar with other parts of the world than north Cambridge. These are parts of the city where most people never go to and never see but the people who live there do jobs that are essential for the city but are largely invisible.”

Lewis Herbert, leader of Cambridge City Council and Labour and Co-op councillor for Coleridge Ward, is dismissive of some of the claims by certain colleges made that some non-academic staff received other benefits that compensated for their low pay.

“Some of the colleges claim they are giving people free meals and other benefits and that’s enough — but given the cost of housing, people still need enough money to pay the rent.”

Herbert acknowledged that the decision by the University of Cambridge in 2018 to start paying its workers the Real Living Wage and seek accreditation from the Living Wage Foundation was a positive development. However, as many workers are employed directly by colleges rather than the university, the colleges can hide behind this technicality — something he is highly critical of.

“The colleges and the university are completely interlinked — the same people who run the university run the colleges so they can’t play Jekyll and Hyde.”

Herbert argues that low pay in colleges reflects the level of inequality in both the city and university. The figures do not suggest that differences in wealth between colleges affects how much they pay their staff.

“In the old days the people in the colleges were called ‘college servants,’ and there is still that feel in certain colleges that it’s upstairs and below stairs.

“In addition to Cambridge being a tale of two cities you’ve got colleges some of whom are no richer or poorer than others, that are at other ends of the league table so you’ve got Clare down there as well as Robinson.”

Herbert also argues that the colleges themselves suffer through paying their staff low wages as well as potentially forcing their staff to move out of Cambridge due to the high cost of living.

“The colleges also suffer because they don’t hold on to their staff. The result of paying wages that people actually can’t live on in the city is that a lot of their staff don’t stay very long.

“Arguably the cost of living in Cambridge is similar to London so even £9 an hour is hard enough to scrape through on.”

Joe Cook, an undergraduate at Homerton College, has been one of the prominent student campaigners on this issue and helped to create the Taylor Table. He has also created a highly acclaimed short documentary, A Choice To Look, which examines the growing level of inequality in Cambridge.

Cook explains that not only are colleges resistant to paying staff higher wages but they are increasingly reliant on using zero-hours contracts and sixth form students.

“A lot of those on very low wages are kitchen staff who are on temporary and zero-hours contracts. When I spoke to the bursar at my own college they were quite animated by the fact that workers on these wages were students from the sixth form next door. Therefore, the low wages were claimed to be justified as this was a job alongside their studies, but that’s not necessarily the case across all colleges.”

Cook argues that the failure of many colleges to pay the Real Living Wage is potentially harming the image of the university amongst local residents despite the efforts of some at the university to improve town-gown relations.

“In terms of the image of the university if all the colleges came out tomorrow and said we value our workers in Cambridge, therefore we are all going to pay them a living wage, it would demonstrate they get the message and are part of the city.

“One of the things we tried to make clear in the film is that it isn’t the case that the university isn’t doing anything at all. There is a team that puts on events that involves townspeople but if you’ve got people working on £6.73 at Christ’s College there is only so much you can do.”