Over 100 people gathered in the somewhat aptly named Keynes Hall in King’s College last week, to discuss the local and national campaign for the living wage.

The rally was organised by Barney McCay, a second-year history student at King’s and Campaigns Officer at Cambridge Universities Labour Club (CULC). Panel members included Priya Kothari, Head of Policy at Save the Children UK, and former CUSU President Tom Chigbo, who now works for Citizens UK.

A campaign run by the Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU) to put pressure on the University and colleges to pay all of their staff the living wage has long been in place, but has recently gained momentum with the appointment this month of a CUSU Living Wage Officer.

Many colleges, however, still lag behind in paying their staff the living wage. Homerton and Jesus are two of the few to have committed to paying all their employees at least £7.45 an hour, although neither of them are yet fully accredited by the Living Wage Foundation. This is due to the fact that they have not extended this commitment to future employees, an immensely important fact according to Chigbo and Citizens UK.

Daniel Zeichner, the Labour parliamentary candidate for Cambridge and former student at King’s, called the current state of affairs at the University of Cambridge “shameful”, with over one thousand employees paid less than the living wage.

Figures obtained through Freedom of Information requests in January suggest that King’s employs 67 permanent staff and 81 casual workers for less than £7.45 per hour.

Workers on low pay are predominantly bedders and canteen staff, who look after students on a day-to-day basis. Heather McKay, a second-year student at Selwyn, noted that she is paid an hourly rate of £7.45 to work in her college bar, while she believes her bedder is paid far less. Selwyn currently employs 27 members of staff for less than the living wage – the average salary for these workers is £7.12 per hour.

More communication between staff and students was Chigbo’s rallying cry. He repeatedly urged the audience to focus on “family, love and action” in campaigning for the living wage. To help students understand the reality of working for less than it costs to maintain a decent standard of living, he advised them to talk to their cleaners. “Invest time in that, above everything else,” he urged the audience.

He also suggested that campaigners avoid the temptation to shame and embarrass employers into raising the wages of their staff; Chigbo instead emphasised the pride that should come with living wage accreditation.

Kayte Lawton, from the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), discussed a paper produced by the IPPR about the practicalities and implications of implementing a living wage.

She pointed out that five million people earn less than the living wage – one-fifth of the total workforce – and that workers at the bottom of the pay scale are predominantly young, female and working in service sector jobs.

The fact that workers employed under the living wage are predominantly part-time, or come from a household where someone else works, means that most people earning less than the living wage do not come from the poorest households.

However, she emphasised the importance of being paid a living wage in giving workers a voice, and increasing revenue for the government. According to IPPR research, the Treasury would take in an extra £3.6 billion per year in taxation if everyone being paid below the national living wage of £7.45 per hour was brought up to this threshold.

Last year, 2.6 million children – 20 per cent of all under-18s in the UK – lived in absolute poverty. This figure will rise to 4.7 million by 2020, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. The UK has one of the highest rates of child poverty of any developed nation.

Unlike Lawton, Kothari from Save the Children argued that low wages are in fact a key contributor to impoverishment: she cited the figure that two-thirds of children living in poverty have one or both parents in work.

“We need to make work pay…The living wage is the minimum level of pay required to ensure an acceptable standard of living for a family,” she told the audience.

“The public sector living wage issue is a women’s issue,” said Heather Wakefield from UNISON. Wakefield is concerned mainly with the actions of local councils in paying their workforce adequately, especially considering that over two-thirds of local government workers are women and in part-time employment, a situation that Wakefield called a “double whammy” of low pay.

Audience members questioned why the panel was not focusing on raising the minimum wage to the living wage, leading onto a point about Britain’s culture of employer philanthropy rather than workers’ rights.

Wakefield conceded that pay structures are hugely complex, although Chigbo maintained that Citizens UK’s system of living wage accreditation is a way of working through the complex layers of employment contracts.

The Living Wage Campaign is needed at the University of Cambridge, it was argued, because bedders and other poorly paid workers have far less freedom to protest against their wages than a student working in a bar.

This “vulnerable set of people,” Zeicher said, are “people who are not going to be rushing to the barricades, because if they get onto the wrong side of their bosses they lose their job, pure and simple.”