Jon Cruddas says Premiership football clubs need to put their house in order – they pay millions to players, but very low wages to key workers without whom they could not function

JUST in case you hadn’t noticed, the FA Premier League football season has kicked off again, bringing nine months of unbridled joy and tension to millions of homes and significant stress to associated bank balances.

The Barclays Premier League is now the most lucrative football league in the world. The combined revenues of Premiership clubs stood at approximately £1.9 billion last season and the 20 clubs spent an astonishing £600 million on playing staff alone. Owing to season ticket price hikes of

7.8 per cent on average – more than double the rate of inflation – and lucrative new broadcasting rights awarded to television monoliths Sky and Setanta Sports, revenues are set to rise dramatically this season

Despite this affluence, poverty pay remains endemic throughout the league for the people manning the turnstiles, serving the tea, sweeping the terraces and even those servicing the luxury hotels of certain household name clubs. Every single club – despite the fortunes being paid at the top end – is condemning many of their workers off the pitch and away from the spotlight to a life of working poverty.

Speaking recently at the headquarters of Premier League sponsors Barclays, recent convert Boris Johnson continued the work of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone by announcing a new London living wage of £7.45 an hour. He said: “In London, largely because of housing costs, you need an hourly rate of nearly 18 per cent above the minimum wage to take you above the poverty level.” All five football clubs in the capital – by extension – are employing hard-working staff on working poor terms.

Further evidence from the anti-poverty authority the Joseph Rowntree Foundation supports this assessment, stating that a single person in Britain needs to earn at least £13,400 a year before tax for a minimum standard of living, while a couple with two children need to spend at least £370 a week. According to bodies such as the TUC, in these difficult times of exorbitant energy, food and housing costs, a British citizen must earn at least £6.80 an hour in order to reach an adequate standard of living.

It has also come to light recently that the Fair Pay Network – which includes the TUC, Unite, Unison and the GMB as coalition members – and the Institute for Public Policy Research have conducted research and sent Premier League clubs voluntary surveys to ascertain what knowledge they have of their own internal pay structures and external agency organised supplier chains. They have discovered widespread low pay at minimum wage level, examples of part-time working based solely on commission or the possibility of a match ticket and even one British-based supplier chain for three Premiership clubs paying an aggregated rate of £2 per hour for the production of official club merchandise

This is scandalous. The moral case for any business and certainly hero-worshipped sporting clubs with vast turnovers paying their staff a fair wage should be obvious, but the business case for such an ethical course of action is just as robust. In addition to Barclays, corporate titans such as Price Waterhouse Coopers, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland are now all implementing fair or living wage policies. They do so not just because this is ethically sound, but also because it makes hard-headed business sense.

Two notable examples of a growing number of private, public and third sector bodies which have set in place fair pay policies are Barclays and KPMG – one of the largest professional services firms in the world employing more than 123,000 people. Since 2006, KPMG has ensured that every cleaner working in its British offices – although employed by third parties – receives the appropriate living wage employment conditions plus allowance for inflation. Similar conditions are given to all on-site supplier staff including catering, mailroom and security employees. Guy Stallard of KPMG told the Fair Pay Network: “We have found that paying the living wage is a smart business move, as increasing wages has reduced staff turnover and absenteeism, while productivity and professionalism has subsequently increased.” Barclays has echoed his sentiments.

With the growth of low-paying jobs such as hospitality and retail positions increasing in the Premiership, the prognosis for low-paying work spreading throughout the elite clubs is very real. Gone are the days when supporters sipped molten Bovril and chewed cold meat puddings; no soccer day out is now complete without a visit to the club superstore and club-branded fast food. For some, even a stay in a glass-fronted swanky stadium hotel is now de rigueur.

Our national sport can and should set a national standard for fairness and lead by example. As my colleague, sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe, put it: “Everyone working for these clubs makes a valuable contribution and it’s only right that they should be fairly rewarded.” The same can be said for all hard-working people across the low-paying sectors throughout Britain, far too many of whom receive low pay as a norm. Initiatives such as the Fair Pay Network serve to reignite grassroots social justice campaigns, not least among trade unionists and local Labour Party members.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham and a patron of the Fair Pay Network. To find out more about the campaign, please visit:  www.fairpaynetwork.org/football