The Living Wage

4 Outsourcing and the real living wage

Evidence from the United Kingdom

Edmund Heery, Deborah Hann and David Nash

Introduction

In an earlier commentary, Jane Wills connected the UK’s campaign for the living wage to what she described as ‘subcontracted capitalism’ (Wills 2009: 442). For Wills, the fight for a living wage was an essential response to an ‘emblematic’ feature of contemporary capitalism, its reliance on subcontracting, which dissolved once integrated employing organizations into a nexus of service and supplier contracts. In this chapter, ten years after Wills’ commentary, we return to the question of the link between the living wage and outsourcing and in doing so explore two broad themes. First, we examine what effect the Living ...