Fair wages

A core principle of Equal Care is to pay decent wages to both independent and employed care workers.

Not only are we a Real Living Wage employer, we make sure that people doing care and support are paid for all the time they are at work, on holiday or sick, so that they can be assured of a stable income. During our development we have moved away from paying people on an hourly rate basis because of this.

That said, it's important to be able to compare us to other agencies and both the national and regional pictures. This is hard to do because agencies will do things like:

• Only pay people for the time they are caregiving, making it look as if they pay more than they really do.

• Include the holiday allocation in the hourly rate they advertise, making it look higher than it really is (so when people go on holiday they still don't get paid).

• Pay the hourly rate for the caregiving but then drop it down to e.g. £1 per mile to 'cover' the travel costs.

• Move all of the risks of being able to provide paid hours of support onto the worker, protecting the organisation from the impacts of, e.g. someone dying and the worker's hours dropping significantly as a result.

We have direct experience of other agencies doing these things. Needless to say, we think this is unfair, exploitative and wrong.

The hourly rate we pay our employees is calculated based on the number of weekly hours set out in their employment contract.

This is not the same as the hours they spend giving direct care.

It covers things like holiday, training, work for the wider co-operative and travel. This all counts in salaried work. It is all work.

This can be confusing. The main point is that our care and support workers are paid for their time at work, not just the time they spend supporting people.

A position on zero-hours contracts

Being on a zero-hours contract is a good way for an employer to have all of the power and flexibility involved in care work, leaving the care worker with little to no agency over their working life.

Equal Care believes that independent workers in any social care organisation should not be subject to zero-hour contracts and that anyone looking to create a co-operative care service should do the same.

These contracts are typically offered as ad hoc shift work, where the care worker does not know who they will be supporting day to day, where they will be going, or how many hours they will be asked to work week to week.

Furthermore, the worker has no say over their hourly rate, and they may even be penalised for not being on hand when the employer needs them—this is not ad hoc work.

Being an independent worker means a person can choose when and where they work, what their rate is and who they work with and for - it is a conscious choice to support and not one forced upon the worker.