One Housing Group finally honours London Living Wage agreement

Follows pressure from Unite

One Housing Group (OHG) failed to honour their commitment to increase pay for low paid members of staff to the level of the London Living Wage as promised back in March.

OHG managers were informed by staff on several occasions that they had not received their correct pay in April and when this was not rectified in May it was brought to their attention once more. When Unite was informed of this recently we discovered that the matter had still not been rectified in late June!

However due to pressure from Unite, we are pleased to announce that OHG have finally paid the monies outstanding. Unite Housing workers initially exposed this in a recent article swiftly followed up by a tweet from the branch and emails from the Unite Regional Official and workplace rep.

Having failed to rectify the matter of effectively withholding wages from low paid workers for two months, OHG HR department then had the cheek to criticise Unite for not checking the position of OHG before sending out tweets! The housing workers branch makes no apology for robustly pursuing our members complaints especially when this was raised repeatedly with OHG before Unite became involved after no action had been taken. It is clearly the employer’s responsibility to comply with pay agreements.

Build bridges

OHG claim that the delay was due to an “administrative error!” Steve O’Donnell, Unite Regional official defended Unite's response by saying, “The matter should never have got to the stage where I was having to contact OHG.  There should have been checks in place to ensure the pay review was implemented correctly and when an employee raises the fact they have been underpaid it should not have to come to the HR Director to resolve it.  

The fact is that OHG knew of the mistake in May and did nothing about it.  Rather than blame Unite for raising the issue more widely perhaps the organisation needs to look at its processes to ensure promises are kept and when notified they haven't been that person in authority needs to take ownership and resolve the matter.”

Maybe OHG can begin to build bridges with low paid staff by agreeing to pay the claim for a Corona Bonus of £1000 that Unite has now lodged. Sign the petition to support the claim and watch this space.

Nick Auvache

June 27th 2020