Quibans 80: Manchester Disunited

Man Utd face pressure to end 'grotesque' failure to pay Living Wage while Alexis Sanchez earns £600k-a-week

1 FEBRUARY 2018

Manchester United will come under major pressure on Thursday to end their “grotesque” failure to pay all workers there the “real” Living Wage after making Alexis Sanchez the highest-paid player in Premier League history during the transfer window.

In November both United and Manchester City faced political pressure to join Liverpool in pledging to ensure everyone who carried out work on their behalf would receive at least £8.75 per hour.

Led by civil society alliance Manchester Citizens, part of campaigning charity Citizens UK, Thursday’s action is accompanied by a release headlined ‘Manchester Divided’, which proclaims Sanchez’s signing has further exposed “a grotesque tale of halves”, in which five of the highest-paid players in the Premier League play for United or City - including Paul Pogba, Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku and Zlatan Ibrahimovic - while “low-paid staff at the Theatre of Dreams are facing a real nightmare to meet the real cost of living”.

It also claims Sanchez makes almost as much during one half of football than the annual salary of some cleaning, catering and security staff who work at Old Trafford (£14,625), that it would take someone on the minimum wage 41 years to earn the £600,000 the Chilean takes home each week, and that his agent’s reported £15 million fee would be enough to fund Living Wage pay rises of almost £2,500 for 6,100 low-paid workers.

One such worker at Old Trafford, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisals, said: “We all share the same employer and it would be great if the club could think about all workers’ wages, from football stars to stadium cleaners and caterers”.



Questions:

1) How much does Sanchez earn per year?

2) Assuming he pays tax at 45% on his earnings, how much is his weekly take-home pay?

3) If the stadium workers earn £8.50 per hour, how many hours per week do they work?

4) Example the claims in the penultimate paragraph. Are they true?

5) If he drops a 50p coin, is it worth his while to bend down and pick it up?



Answers:

1) £600,000 x 52 = £31.2 million

2) £330,000 (while he will have a tax-free allowance of about £10,000 and a lower rate for the next chunk of his salary, this is negligible).

3) This is about 36 hours per week, assuming they work for 48 weeks per year. There is something a little strange here, in that presumably many more staff are needed during a match than on other days. Presumably many of the workers are therefore part-time.

4) In one half of football Sanchez makes £14,625? This works if he is considered to be ‘working’ for 30 hours per week throughout the year.

41 year? Yes.

Agent’s fee of £15 million? Yes

5) If you divide his salary up across the week it comes to about 99p per second (even for the time he is asleep). In the ~2 seconds it would take for him to lean down to pick up a 50p coin he will have earned 4 times that!



Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2018/02/01/man-utd-face-pressure-end-grotesque-failure-pay-living-wage/