At Jolly Good Beer we believe in paying our staff a fair wage for the time they contribute to the business. Since we employed our first PAYE employee in 2017 we have always been mindful of the Living Wage Foundation‘s Real Living Wage and have always paid above their rate. As we pass through the COVID-times it seemed good time to make it official – and now, in November 2021, we officially signed up as an accredited Living Wage employer and will take the responsibility to continue to pay our employees above this wage, and supply them with the hours of work they require.
It seems especially relevant in these times – gradually coming out of the impacts of COVID on our industry, with some path ahead before we’re really out of it. This cements our commitment to do things the right way despite some adversity. We have pulled through intact thus far – this has been no small feat – and has of course required the support of the Furlough Scheme as well as bank debt. We hope to go on providing our staff with employment – and grow and bring further good employment to our area of West Norfolk. We have even hired six new staff in 2021 – two HGV drivers and a warehouse assistant based at out HQ, an additional driver in Kent, and two remote-working administration staff. Firm foundations in place for 2022.
Jolly Good Beer is also well aware of the impacts of inflation on living standards so as well as maintaining the Real Living Wage as our minimum wage we also, contractually, annually increment the wages of all employees who have been with us a year or more by the official ONS August RPI figure. And we believe downtime is good – and as such have a scheme where employees earn additional annual leave over time with the business.
We are also, of course, fully committed to being an equal opportunities employer.
What we hope this means to our customers and suppliers is that in supporting us they are supporting doing things the right way – in more ways that one. Sure, we are all about beer quality – but we are also about business quality and the quality of life of our staff. By using Jolly Good Beer you’re avoiding lowest-common-denominator generic supply chain options where not only do you not really know what’s happening to your product from A-to-B, you also don’t really know how staff are treated in that chain. “Craft beer” (and other awesome indy products) is to us as much a social movement as it is about tasty liquid in a container – and along with many others in our sector of the drinks industry we want to see improvements at all levels, and put the humans who are key to our industry first.
