Motion on Senior Staff Pay and the Living Wage

Motion passed at Unison University of Birmingham branch on the 13th of March 2018

The University is a large and successful international organisation that regularly boasts of its own academic and financial successes. It regularly uses this self-proclaimed success as a means to attract high quality students and managers. The University defends high senior salaries by claiming market value but then paradoxically refuses to pay the living wage by citing uncertainty and financial instability. If senior managers were achieving their objectives, surely the university could afford to keep their lowest paid colleagues out of food banks.

This branch calls upon the University, a charitable organisation that receives millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money and organises sustained appeals for charitable donations, to:

* Explain its decision to pay its highest earning 44 members of staff a staggering £8 million-plus per year from the University’s resources

* Implement a fairer remuneration structure across the University

* Publicly affirm that they will become an accredited living wage employer and commit to paying the real living wage each year when it rises in November.

We call for senior management to be paid no more than 10 times the lowest paid member of staff at the university.