ONS data shows 6m workers paid less than living wage

Overall, six million jobs pay below £7.65 an hour – which works out at just £14,000 a year for full-time workers. Proportionally, that’s 12 per cent of full-time jobs and 45 per cent of part-time jobs.

Between April 2008 and April 2010, the proportion of jobs paid less than the Living Wage in London remained stable at around 13 per cent, but it had risen to 19 per cent by April 2014. In 22 states, at least half of new jobs will pay less than the $15 figure.

Recently, retailer Morrisons announced it would increase wages for 90,000 staff to £8.20 an hour from March, and other retailers have also committed to increase pay by a smaller amount.

Meanwhile, separate research from job site CV-Library shows United Kingdom professionals working in the City of London are the poorest workers in Britain.

The selection of potential customers living on below the Living Wage has exploded by 6 percent in to 19p c, new numbers from the originial and Office of National Statistics expose. In retail in 2014, there were an estimated 55% of employee jobs paid less than the living wage in London and 59% in the rest of the UK. Northern Ireland had the highest proportion of jobs below the living wage (29%).

The living wage, an independently set hourly rate, is based on the cost of living and is now set at £7.85 outside London and £9.15 in the capital.

A few 48 per cent of jobs in the 18-24 age group in London and 58 per cent of jobs in this age group elsewhere in the United Kingdom were paid less than the Living Wage.

The Garden State’s minimum wage of $8.38 an hour is only about 42 percent of the $19.76 an hour the study asserts is a living wage here for a single adult.

Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner said: “The Living Wage needs to be made compulsory and should be £10 an hour – and Britain’s companies, with strong cash reserves, can well afford to pay it”. At present it is not possible to present estimates of jobs below the NLW because data for April 2016 will not be available until later that year.

And the real number is likely to be higher as the figures exclude people under 18 and workers on the youth, training, and apprenticeship rates of the minimum wage.