It’s recently been in the news that Lush founder, Mark Constantine has increased staff wages from £6.80 an hour to £7.85, after ‘challenging’ conversations with his staff. Too right they should be challenging £6.80 an hour: to my mind they should never have been on that small an amount in the first place.
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| Karma Soap |
Lush prides itself on all things ethical and seems to have come out shining on this one, with Mr C having ‘searched his conscience’ when all along he maybe should have been searching his wallet. Body Shop, after all, pay in London £8.65.
Worldwide revenues for Lush are £247 million with profit-before-tax £22.3 million.*
*source: retailgazette.co.uk
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28 comments
Lush customers have been supporting this and on his case about it for a long time now. Good news. Still shoddy though, but better.
To be honest, £6.80 is pretty generous for retail, I used to work in retail and was always on the absolute minimum wage, it may suck but it’s the deal. Glad lush are maybe setting a new standard though
Am I right in thinking this is just in London and not the whole country?
That is great news to hear. I used to work for Lush, if only that raise had been put in place when I wasthere!
@Yoshi – I agree that £6.80 isn’t bad for retail, but Lush employees do so much more than the general retail work. I guess you have to work the job to know the job.
x
Agree that £6.80 isn’t bad at all for retail, although there is an element of sales in Lush (more’s the pity in some cases where you can barely move for over-friendly sales assistants) that’s also true of a lot of shop floor work that pays less. I’m impressed by Mark Constantine’s approach and hope it catches on more both inside and outside London.
I am a bit shocked to read this. I work at a Space NK branch in south West London and their basic wage is 6.50 an hour! For a high end luxury beauty retailer! I have been fighting for over 6 months to move up to 7.00 an hour and they have refused despite being the single top performer in my store…
Karla – Yes it seems to be just London, which I know has angered a lot of the shop staff over the rest of the country!
Karla I’m not sure.. I’ll try and find out. I know retail wages are shocking but I thought that maybe being a proudly ‘ethical’ company, Lush might have extended that to staff as well as charities.
Beauty retail as well as other retail wages are just a disgrace. And always have been.
I work in retail and I WISH I got paid that much! I’ve been with the company I work for for three years and have just passed the £6 an hour mark (not in London mind you) and it’s not like we’re quite an expensive company with a long history.
Actually I don’t know anyone who works in retail who earns that much unless they’re a manager. Retail wages aren’t great but I guess that’s just part and parcel of the job, I do feel for people who have to support families on retail wages it must be difficult. I applaud the staff at Lush for fighting for more money but I wish people realised that low wages is a retail wide thing and not just an issue at one company.
I’m just thankful for minimum wage, I dread to think what companies paid before that came into existence!
I had no idea and Lush being well so ethical in its ingredients etc. Glad to hear the wages increased for the staff.
To Yoshi, £6.80 is NOT generous at all! I have been in retail for 10 years and £6.80 is rubbish! At Swarovski they start at £9.05 for sales consultants as they so nicely call them 😉
Is this a good soap? I haven’t tried this in my whole life.
Claire M.
I work in retail and the wages aren’t great – but to be fair, alot of industry wages are poor.
After reading these comments I think I might try to a job at Swarovski 😉
I work for a large pharmacy chain and I get less than £6.80. I think it goes up to £7.50 when I complete a NVQ level 2.
I went for a job interview at Lush and they said that we would get commission based bonuses. I don’t know what this would actually shake out to in real money but it’s probably a factor.
I may be totally off here, but I was under the impression that most Lush stores were franchises. If so, it might well be that Lush don’t have any control over wages in some of the stores. Does anyone know for sure? (Incidentally that doesn’t get them off the hook morally – they could have a minimum wage written into a franchise contract if it were something they were bothered about).
I work in a professional environment and I’m on much less than £6.80 an hour (though it is a placement) and my last job was retail and that was £6 an hour on a pay freeze for 2 years. I used to take £3k a day in that job too. I might start working at Lush!
Holy cow, I will never do that sort of work again. Now that I haven’t worked as a cashier or waitress for about a decade, I look back and wonder how I actually worked for $4.25 an hour and $2.90 an hour. Seriously, those were my hourly wages. Granted the $2.90 was supplemented with tips but on a bad night, that wasn’t much.
However, at university in 1998, our on-campus jobs — which were real jobs. I was the studio assistant at the university art gallery and worked my butt off — paid $9 (and tax free to boot, so that was, in real terms $12+ an hour), which was both a living wage and an eye opener to the previous fallacy I lived by — that a very very low paying job is better than no job. Thank you, uni, for being so egalitarian with salaries.
And if any one is interested in learning more about just how near impossible it is to live on such low wages, check out Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days — Living on Minimum Wage and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
*rant over*
Don’t get me started! I work in retail and over the past decade, my employer has whittled down pay and benefits to little more than they are legally obliged to offer. And this was before the recession made things worse.
Like many people, I do a good deal more than what’s on the job description and live with the threat of redundancy. That’s the reality of the workplace these days.
If Lush are offering nearly £8 an hour, I say good for them. Better late than never. They are the exception to the average in retail.
Colin – No they’re not franchised, Lush have control over their stores! 🙂
Are you kidding?! Is UK some sort of third world country? The minimum wage here is £10/hour, and most student jobs pay way more. My old job paid £15/hour, which is normal…jeez your wages are low compared to Denmark!
omg…i can’t believe that’s the minimum wage in Denmark. I work my BUTT off for Jack wills who made something ridiculous like 80% profit from the year before last year and i get £6.50 an hour. Fitness First pay something measly like £5.85 an hour. Honestly by the time you’ve gotten to work you’ve spent that shift in travel and lunch. It’s honestly DISGUSTING that they pay so little in such an ‘advanced’ country. You can NEVER save for anything on that wage.
I work in Lush, outside London.
I get minimum wage – £5.93 p/h. Bonuses are based on the performance of the shop as a whole taking into account more than takings – ie; wastage etc. None of the UK Lush stores are franchised.
Yup Ida, pay in the UK is well low compared to most of the rest of Europe! Same in Germany, if I tell someone I am earning £6.80 an hour after 6 years in the job (NHS) they don’t believe me and think I’m joking. (And that’s actually after “agenda for change” which increased the lower pay bands quite a bit!) Several people there have told me they’re on a “rubbish wage” of 15 Euro an hour, and they wouldn’t take a lower paid job ever! That said, the state pension here is also crap, at the moment the maximum is £400 a month – yes, a month, not a week!! (Even in Greece that’s 1000 Euro) Living costs in Britain are lower than Germany though (outside London..), and you save a lot on not paying health insurance.. still works out crap pay in comparison though!
Ida… agreed that the base wage here in the UK is low, but having been to Norway and Denmark a lot and having friends from there:
1) cost of living is much higher than in the UK, hence why minimum wage is higher
2) you have to pay much higher taxes than we do in the UK (and ours are quite high enough already!!)
Um. I think it is a bit weird that you are all having a chat about how much I as a lush employee earn. And that you know this kind of information when we only found out on Wednesday. Bit inappropriate. Plus does it make a difference to anything and why do you care?
This article is incorrect. Lush wages have been minimum wage for sales assistants. And the increase is 25p above that now