Staff at the substance misuse charity Equinox Care staged a demonstration outside the charity’s board meeting on Wednesday in protest at proposed pay cuts of up to £6,000 a year.
The Southwark-based charity, which provides specialist residential and community-based care to people with drug, alcohol and mental health problems, employs around 125 staff. In its last financial year, to the end of March 2012, it had income of £9.2m but spent £9.7m.
Last year, in response to the tightening financial situation, Equinox compared the salaries of its staff with other similar organisations in the fields of mental health, homelessness and substance misuse, and decided to adjust the pay scales of each of its 70 job roles.
According to the charity’s chief executive, Bill Puddicombe, this exercise revealed that the lowest-paid 15 per cent of staff were receiving less money than their counterparts elsewhere, and so their salaries will rise under the new proposals, by between 10 and 25 per cent.
But a number of posts were found to be paid well above market rates, and so pay cuts have been proposed for those employees, he said.
Cuts 'avoid redundancies'
“Commissioners are paying us less and less for our services and we have to adapt to that,” he said. “But rather than make people redundant we opted to reduce our overall wage bill.”
Equinox has already lost around half of its staff over the last year or so as it lost tenders and employees moved to other organisations that won the contracts.
Unite the Union has accused the charity of passing on the biggest cuts to frontline staff while insulating managers from the worst. It also pointed out that Puddicombe is eligible, for the first time in the charity’s history, for a performance-related bonus.
Jamie Major, Unite regional officer, said: “Staff can be excused for believing that this performance bonus will be earned as a direct result of drastically reducing their wages.”
Puddicombe said that both he and the finance director had taken a pay cut of 6 per cent since the start of this month, but that built in to his package is a small bonus conditional upon certain targets being met. However this bonus, if paid, would not take him back to his pre-cut salary, he said.
The consultation period ended at the beginning of last week and during the consultation, the union proposed an offer that “would have seen us going out of business before long”, Puddicombe said. Since the charity has rejected this, Unite has announced it is in dispute with the charity and has threatened industrial action, he said.
But Puddicombe insists that Equinox had no choice. “No one would choose to do what we have done if they didn’t have to,” he said. “I would also point out that we’ve never done this before and some of our competitors are now doing it for a second time.”
