“Avarice is a deadly sin”
St Patrick
Dear colleagues
Ten employees of St Mungo’s between them made more than £1 million in wages last year. They will tell you that more wages bring in better workers – more wages, that is, for those at the top.
Unite thinks that improving pay for ordinary workers will have more of a positive impact on the quality of work we can do for our clients. Recent (real terms) pay cuts have led to serious problems with recruitment and retention. As well as anxiety about whether we will be able to pay our rent, workers are coping with the stresses of covering the gaps in understaffed teams.
But what about the highest paid workers – is it true that you get better results by paying more? For a homelessness charity, probably not.
If St Mungo’s is to do well in serving its clients, it needs to be led by managers who see homeless people as human beings with innate worth and homelessness, therefore, as a blight to be eradicated. Those who are willing to accept unreasonably high wages from a homelessness charity, knowing that it will take money from the services provided to homeless people, are not the best people to make decisions about the charity’s direction.
At St Mungo’s, each director is paid more than a Junior Government Minister, while the Chief Executive is paid more than the PM. It is the people with these inflated wages who made decisions to:
- Accept money from the Home Office on a per deportee basis for unlawfully sharing data about clients so that they could be removed from the country.
- Outsource our IT services and switch Occupational Health services away from the NHS without consulting the workers affected.
- Cut real wages for essential workers without thinking about the effect on clients.
- Spend money on the huge white elephant of TMS and shiny fripperies like Office 365.
- Cut services including move-on support and psychotherapy that our clients depend on.
For a charity, it is not a good idea to increase wages for people who already get paid a lot more than they need to live on. It’s not only costly, but also likely to bring in the wrong people, causing harm to workers and clients as a result.
We have been told that correcting the recent pay cut affecting ordinary workers is unaffordable. We have analysed St Mungo’s financial information carefully with assistance from a forensic accountant and established that this is not the case. Undervaluing St Mungo’s essential staff is a decision – a bad decision.
Please vote yes in the pay ballot.
Best wishes
Jacob
Jacob Sanders
Unite Convenor, St Mungo’s
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