Diocese of Oxford (00:00)
Through Citizens UK, ⁓ we got to learn about the Real Living Wage and about ways we can effect that easily by looking just at ourselves. And in doing so, ⁓ I came back and spoke to Sonya, our vicar, and we had a cleaning company here at the Minster that employed four cleaners. And when we spoke to that company and said, are you paying a living wage to them?

it was quite clear they weren't. And we asked them, we gave them a period of six months to look at addressing that and they didn't. So what we did do is we spoke to the cleaners, the people who working for them and said to them, look, have you thought about starting off for yourselves and paying the real living wage and we'll support you in doing so. But not only that, we'll also speak to Street Pastors who rent a building from us.

and ask them to do the same and pay the Real Living Wage to you as well. Now that cleaning service has gone on from having four people to now cleaning in three other churches and now 18 people working for them receiving the full [real] living wage. But also we rent a building to Bill's restaurant and we've started engaging with them about Real Living Wage. Now most of their employees are now

getting paid the Real Living Wage, but the cleaners aren't and that's an area we're working on now. So it has led us to see that just engaging through people that we hire in to do jobs for the church, that we can engage in helping people's lives and making them better. That's fantastic. Have you heard about the difference that makes getting paid the the Real Living Wage for workers themselves?

Yeah, we have. Yeah, very much. It has made a massive difference. Do you know, when the cleaners come in now, right, they're, they're buoyant, they're happy and really grateful because Eben, who's now got his own company, ⁓ has told them that how this come about. And we have a really lovely relationship with those people, as do the Street Pastors, Sally and her team have a lovely working relationship on a

We're all on first name terms and ⁓ there's a real trust there. And when you see the difference that this makes, it's huge, really huge.