Contested Terrain: London’s Living Wage Campaign and the Tensions Between Community and Union Organising
Contested Terrain: London’s Living Wage Campaign and the Tensions Between Community and Union Organising
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争议地区：伦敦的生活工资运动以及社区和工会组织之间的紧张关系
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发表时间：
2009
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通讯作者：
J. Holgate
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作者：
J. Holgate
2001 年圣诞节前几天，伦敦繁忙的牛津街的购物者们怀疑是否有一群修女为了购买圣诞礼物而袭击了她们的存钱罐。修女们把购物车里的大量零钱推到汇丰银行的一家大街分行，然后开始堵塞排队的队伍，因为工作人员忙着数硬币。然而，事情并不像看上去的那样。这些修女是东伦敦社区组织（Telco）的一部分，这一特殊行动是抗议活动的一部分，旨在引起人们的注意，在汇丰银行金丝雀码头闪亮的新大楼工作的清洁和保安人员的工资不足以在伦敦这样的昂贵城市生活。抗议的目的是说服汇丰银行主席约翰·邦德爵士与电信公司会面讨论这一问题。这些社区活动人士希望汇丰银行的分包工人能够获得“生活工资”，而不仅仅是法定的最低工资。电信公司辩称，像汇丰银行这样的大型跨国公司有道德义务确保其承包商支付足以维持人们生活的工资。尽管一开始抵制活动人士的要求，汇丰银行最终于 2004 年同意确保其所有承包商向其工人支付生活工资，其中包括病假工资、养老金计划和免费加入工会的权利。
A few days before Christmas in 2001, shoppers in London’s busy Oxford Street were left wondering if a group of nuns had raided their piggy banks in order to buy their Christmas presents. The nuns wheeled large quantities of small change in shopping trolleys into a high street branch of HSBC bank and proceeded to block the queues as staff were kept busy by counting the coins. However, things were not as they appeared. The nuns were part of The East London Communities Organisation (Telco) and this particular action was part of a protest designed to draw attention to the fact that cleaning and security staff, contracted to work in HSBC’s shiny new building in Canary Wharf, were not paid sufficient to live in an expensive city like London. The intention of the protest was to persuade HSBC’s Chairman, Sir John Bond, to meet with Telco to discuss this issue. These community campaigners wanted HSBC’s subcontracted workers to be paid a ‘living wage’, not merely the statutory minimum wage.’ Telco argued that large multi-national companies like HSBC have a moral duty to ensure their contractors pay a wage that is sufficient for people to live on. Although at first resistant to the campaigner’s demands, HSBC finally agreed in 2004 to ensure all its contractors paid their workers a living wage, which included sick pay, access to a pension scheme and free access to a trade union.