Fair Play, Fair Pay

From the Fair Pay Network:

The Barclays Premier League is the most lucrative football league in the world. The combined revenues of Premiership clubs stood at approximately £1.9 billion last season and the twenty clubs spent an astonishing £600 million on players. Revenues are set to rise dramatically owing to ticket price hikes and new broadcasting rights.

Yet despite this affluence poverty pay remains endemic throughout the premiership. As a result, every single club-despite 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.

According to the Greater London Authority, a person living in the capital must earn at least £7.45 per hour to avoid living in poverty; with a national figure estimated to be around £6.80 per hour. However, fair pay is not just a matter of fairness. It is also hard-headed business sense. It is for this reasons that many large businesses-including official Premiership sponsors Barclays-now as a matter of policy pay all staff a "living wage."

On this basis the Fair Pay Network and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) are calling on all premiership clubs to pledge themselves to a Hatrick Gold Standard of ethical employment terms. These consist of:

 A fair wage of at least £7.45 an hour in London (London Living Wage as designated by the Low Pay Unit of the Greater London Authority) and £6.80 an hour in the rest of the country (estimated national living wage - 60 per cent of gross, median full-time pay (equivalent to £13,100 or £12,376 a year for a full-time working week)
 The right to paid holiday (a minimum of 25 days) and paid parental leave.
 Equal treatment of all staff, whether directly employed or on an agency contract.

We want to encourage every Premiership club to become a fair wage and ethical employer. In doing so they can ensure that those at the bottom who contribution so much to the commercial success of their clubs do not have to live a life of poverty.
We want our national sport to set a national standard for fairness.

How and why football continues to enjoy a working-class following has long been beyond me. Super-rich, spoilt, petulant, mincing meterosexuals who would, if they were anyone else, be lucky to escape alive from the watering holes of their far nobler fans.

But then again, who really does follow football these days? Who can afford the season tickets? Only the "lads' mag" crowd depicted in Carlsberg advertisements. They may not yet be super-rich. But they want to be. And they are already spoilt, petulant, mincing meterosexuals who would be lucky to escape alive from the watering holes of the football fans of old.