Them & Us


Minimum wage storm

High street retail group Monsoon Accessorize was caught paying more than a quarter of its UK store staff below the minimum wage.

HM Revenue and Customs has named and shamed the firm as part of a list of 115 law breakers. In Monsoon’s case, employees were required to wear the store’s own clothes for work – which they had to buy. This brought net wages below the legal minimum.

The fashion company has been made to pay a total of £104,508 to 1,438 workers. But its fine for illegal poverty pay is a mere £28,148. The firm made over £18 million profit before tax in the financial year to 2013.

Monsoon is a founding member of the ‘Ethical Trading Initiative’ – strapline: “respect for workers worldwide”.

Flight fit for a king

David Cameron spent over £100,000 flying to the funeral of human rights abuser King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia.

Return tickets from London to Riyadh in economy class cost from £464 a head. And last year, Cameron plus five flew to the G20 meetings in Australia – the opposite side of the planet – for just £13,290.

£101,792 to pay respect to a super-rich, unelected leader of a state which tortures and kills dissidents. That one trip would have paid four staff nurses’ salaries for a year. NHS wards are currently dangerously understaffed.

But then staff nurses don’t make Cameron’s mates much money. British investments in Saudi Arabia total £9.8 billion. And who cares about human rights when the crude oil supply is at stake?

  • 1 – Cameron’s one £100k trip to the funeral of a serial human rights abuser in Saudi Arabia could have paid for…
  • 4 – full-time nurses for a year for our understaffed NHS, or…
  • 85 – FE students from low-paid households to receive a year’s Education Maintenance Allowance – £30 a week for books and supplies