Why HR should care about low pay

I was shocked to learn that, as most of us were enjoying our festive lunch, almost one million UK staff were engaged in a normal working day on 25 December. The largest group of those workers? Care assistants and care workers, almost 200,000 of them, overwhelmingly female.

There has been a lot of focus over the past two years on top pay and those perceived to be doing well in a period of recession and now public-sector cuts. The relentless upward march of executive remuneration in the private sector over the past decade saw average FTSE-100 CEO pay increase from under £1 million to almost £2.5 million a year, and from 47 times average earnings to 88 times in 2009.