Lidl and the living wage

We find this interesting:

Lidl is giving its UK staff a pay rise worth £10m with a higher hourly rate likely to propel it to the top of the supermarket pay league table.

The retailer said 19,000 employees would get a pay rise in March when its hourly rate would move from £9 to £9.30 outside London and from £10.55 to £10.75 in the capital. The rises match the higher rate announced by the Living Wage Foundation – the charity which sets the voluntary measure – last week.

This is consistent with the basic analysis of higher wages. Employers who use labour more productively can - and often will - pay higher wages. The other side of the same statement being that those who employ more productive labour employ less labour. That’s what more productive means, that you get the same output from the input of less labour time.

That is, higher wages mean fewer have jobs. Our example here, Lidl, is famed for cutting back on the labour used to provide retail services. Shelf-stacking is in fact box-stacking, not individual items. Barcodes are printed on every side of the packaging to reduce till time.

Lidl is a labour-light method of retail. Which is why they can - and do - pay those higher wages.

But it’s this which we find absolutely fascinating:

Katherine Chapman, the director of the Living Wage Foundation, said: “It’s a great to hear that Lidl will be going beyond the government minimum and paying the new real living wage rate to employees. However, as Lidl is not accredited with the Living Wage Foundation, we can’t be sure that its subcontracted staff, such as cleaners, trolley collectors and warehouse workers, are paid this rate.”

We’re rather straying into the realms of religion here rather than economics or justice. Actions don’t matter so much in receiving that imprimatur.

To find out more details about the criteria for accreditation, read the FAQs. There is a sliding scale of accreditation fees depending on the size of your organisation.

Much more important is paying the tithe to keep the Tarquins and Jocastas in their comfortable offices.

The medieval Catholic Church would have been proud of that, home as it so often was to the extra, superfluous, offspring of the upper classes looking for a comfy berth.