People & Planet’s Buy Right campaign puts the spotlight on the sweatshop conditions and unfair pay faced across the world by workers in university supply chains. But you don’t even have to leave campus to find examples of workers struggling to get by on poverty wages. FairPensions’ Juliette Daigre explains the work they’re doing on Living Wages in the UK.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Living Wage campaigning in the UK, and it will come as no surprise to P&Pers that students have been at the forefront of this campaign. Ten of London’s leading universities are or have committed to become Living Wage employers, paying all their staff – including cleaners on contracts – a wage of £8.30/hour, over £2 more than the national minimum wage. And with this month’s announcement of – for the first time ever – a national Living Wage rate for outside London, it’s to be hoped that many more universities will soon be following suit.

But even with these great wins, that doesn’t mean that poverty has been eradicated from university campuses. Look around you, and what do you see? Almost certainly, a bank branch: perhaps RBS/Natwest, targeted by People & Planet as UK’s biggest backer of tar sands companies, or Barclays, whose massive bonuses and a “greed is good” mantra has seen them hit the headlines.

What you don’t see so often in the headlines is how much these banks’ lowest paid employees earn. In many cases, those at the bottom of the pay scale earn less in a year than the chief executives of the very same companies earn in a week. And at a time when Britain is facing massive public service cuts and inflation is on the rise, it is becoming ever more difficult for low paid workers to get by. Despite working multiple jobs - keeping them away from their family and communities and often at cost to their health - these workers still struggle to meet costs for housing, food and other basic needs.

FairPensions is trying to curb the shocking pay gap and to lift people out of the grim reality of working poverty by pushing for the adoption of Living Wages by some of the UK’s biggest and best known companies – starting with the banks.

You might feel like a cash-strapped student, but the money – no matter how little! – you hold in your bank account gives you real power to influence companies’ behaviour. Banks want you – they want your student overdraft, and most importantly they want your loyalty. And so as their customer, when you speak, they will listen. If together we organise our money by asking banks to pay their employees a Living Wage, we have a real chance to lift families across Britain out of working poverty.

Ask your bank to pay Living Wages at: www.activateyourmoney.org