Fair Pay at Twining Enteprise
Last week marked both Living Wage Week and rather less positively Equal Pay Day, the symbolic day in the year when women stop being paid as the current median woman’s salary is 14.5% of a mans, women effectively work for free from now until the end of the year.
Our ethos in our work supporting people with mental health issues to find and maintain work we believe that work provides a range of positive impacts on a person's life that everybody deserves to benefit from. However, a huge part of this is ensuring that people are provided greater financial security and freedom from poverty than remaining on benefits can offer. Our Employment Specialists working across 14 London boroughs are dedicated to supporting our clients into secure and stable employment which pays a decent wage.
Fair wages are extremely important to us. That’s why we have been signed up to the Living Wage Foundation’s London Living Wage of a minimum of £10.20. Low salaries below the living wage particularly for part time work are paid to twice as many women as men as indicated by ONS figures and the Poverty website. A fifth of women are receiving less than £7.00 an hour for their work.
We believe that everyone deserves to access the benefits of work and a fair wage that you can comfortably live on even in expensive cities like London is a big part of that. But we go further than that to ensure our salaries are fair. As part of our commitment to paying fair and equal salaries to men and women we also have a range of senior part time roles filled by men and women benchmarked against full time salaries for such roles.
As a further indication of our commitment to fairness and transparency in our work we don’t operate a bonus system as this is often a way in which firms are able to obscure the true amounts different staff are paid.
Finally, the ratio for our worker to CEO salary differential is extremely modest. Our hierarchy is relatively flat and our salaries reflect that, there are no fat cats at Twining Enterprise!
“For a relatively small charity it’s clear that Twining is committed to fairness in pay across the board, let’s hope this Equal Pay Day (10 November) inspires other employers to do more to help close the gender pay gap in the near future.” Jo Phaure, Communications Manager Twining Enterprise (& East London Fawcett Society member)
