Why we want a living wage for Wales

Posted by Sara on behalf of a group of young campaigners in Wales.

We are a group of young people who are working with Save the Children to campaign about the living wage.

We all live in Cardiff.

Some of us the first got involved with Save the Children through a project at our school, Fitzalan High School.

Our group spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted to make our school and communities better places.

We also talked about the problems that people who live in poverty face and how difficult this makes life for them and their families.

Making a change

We wanted to make our school look brighter and nicer and also tell everyone about what we had learned so we created murals to raise awareness of child poverty and child rights for all the teachers, pupils and visitors to admire.

We found out that many people living in poverty are working really hard but not earning much money.

We wanted to make a change for people in Wales so we decided that our campaign would be about the living wage.

Keeping promises

The living wage is the minimum amount of money a person gets paid an hour: £6.08.

We don’t think that is enough and want it to be £7.20. This will make it easier for parents to buy things like food and clothes and to pay their bills.

The government in Wales has already made a promise to do this and our petition asks them to keep that promise.

We have been asking people in our school, our families and friends to sign our petition. We feel this has gone really well.

We say . . .

“Many people didn’t know what the living wage was until I brought the petition into school. They thought that raising the living wage was a very good idea.” (Iram)

“I am campaigning on the living wage because I think it’s unfair that people are working hard and not earning enough to have a good standard of living.” (Sophie)

“I feel really angry when I see people that work really long hours and still can’t afford to make ends meet.” (Ruby)

“I’m campaigning because I worry that although I work hard when I’m older I might not be able to earn enough money for my family.” (Evan)