The Living Wage Campaign

I want you to help me take this campaign around the country so I wanted to share with you the message I gave at the campaign launch yesterday:

Let me start by thanking Citizens UK for organising this event, all the people who have turned out to show support.

Three months ago at a meeting organised by London Citizens, I met a cleaner who worked in Whitehall, who talked to me about her struggle to make ends meet.

It was her struggle and her story that inspired us to put a commitment in the Labour manifesto to pay the living wage in Whitehall departments.

And the reason I am launching my campaign for a living wage today, and the reason I want Labour party members to be involved in it, is that it speaks to three deep and fundamental questions that we should be talking about today:

What kind of society do we want to live in?
How does the Labour party bring about change?
And what can each of us do to make a difference?

First of all, why does the living wage campaign speak so profoundly to our values?

Because it touches our deep sense of justice, of fairness and of a belief in the dignity of work.

We just know it’s wrong when we look at the cleaner in the government department or in a bank in the City and we believe deep in our soul that when they are working every hour that God sends they should be paid enough to live on.

We know it’s wrong when some of our leading companies can have chief executives that can rake in millions and there is a security guard that doesn’t get a living wage.

The living wage campaign speaks to something else about our society: the issue of power in our society.

The minimum wage will always be the legal floor.

But we believe in a society where people do more than the legal minimum.

Just like many employers go beyond the legal requirements on the environment, on training and on investing in the local community, so too we want them to do so on wages.

Whether this happens will be determined not just by the law but by the distribution of power and the consequences of that.

And our duty as citizens is to force this issue onto the agenda of employers: because we know that individual employees will never have the power to force it on to the agenda.

That is why we need to act together.

Some people might say, given the fiscal climate, now is not the time for a living wage.

But we are campaigning now because some employers can afford to pay the living wage now, and all of us know that the best and most successful campaigns in our history take not days, not weeks, not months but years – and that’s why we must make a start today.

And the living wage speaks profoundly to our party and its future.

We are the party of labour – and the living wage is an embodiment of that.

But we need a different kind of labour party to deliver that change.

As someone said to me last week – delivering leaflets is an essential role for Labour party members but it is only one small part of the change they can achieve.

Some people will tell you that you can’t achieve anything in Opposition. Of course we want to get to back to power but the role of Opposition is not just to oppose but also to create:

To create a movement that can change things in Opposition and government.

To create the conditions in which you can win power

And to create a mandate for things you want to win for

And I say to our party: we cannot win the next election unless we become a genuine popular movement.

Being a member of the Labour Party should be about campaigning for change in people’s lives today, not just a change in government at the next election.

The path back to power lies not through managerialism but mobilization.

I’ve seen campaigns like Karen Buck in Westminster North or Stella Creasy in Walthamstow and I know the Labour Party can become the most effective grass-roots campaigning organization in Britain.

And so the third question is this: what can each of us do to make a difference?

As Matthew Bolton said to me, no one ever leaves a Citizens UK meeting without a mission.

So what I am going to do is launch my national campaign and take it around the country.

I am going to be urging labour party members to get involved in the living wage campaign.

I am going to be holding more events in local areas, including with the Fair Pay Network, who have pushed for this for many years, and the trade unions, not just in London but around the country.

I am publishing a campaign pack spelling out what people can do:

To work with a local coalition that can start to mount a campaign

To work with the local labour group or council to win their support

To reach out to employees and to local businesses to put it on their agenda

The living wage campaign can become the hallmark of a Labour party engaged in local communities, campaigning for change.

It can show that even in Opposition we can help some of the poorest people in society to do better.

I want the labour leadership campaign to be not simply about electing a person but building a movement.

It is about showing to young and old alike, that labour can be once again the best force for change in Britain.

The American politician Robert Kennedy said that each time someone stands up for an ideal, it sends out a ripple of hope and those ripples can build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression.

That’s what Citizens UK does.

That’s what the living wage does.

And that’s what I want the Labour Party to do.