A Haydock business is demonstrating its commitment to the area by joining a scheme to provide local people with better and fairer employment conditions.
GGM Groundscare, part of the GGM Group, has become an accredited Living Wage Employer in order to support it’s staff as the cost of living increases year on year, ensuring that employees are earning a wage that is enough to live on. The group employs 38 staff across two sites.
The Living Wage Campaign is a movement of independent businesses and organisations who believe a fair days work deserves a fair days pay. Paid on a completely voluntary basis, the living wage is an independently calculated figure which reflects the true cost of living across the UK. Currently £9 an hour in the North West, it is considerably more than the legal minimum wage and is designed to help people better support their families, making a huge difference to their lives.
Chris Gibson, Managing Director at GGM Groundscare explains
“In these uncertain times, just paying the bills is becoming more and more expensive. Many of our employees have young families to support and we want to ensure that they don’t simply “get by” – but that they live well.
“As a well-established family organisation, we have extremely high expectations of our staff. We have an outstanding team and its only right that we reward them fairly for the contribution they make to the success of our business.”
“Not only are we doing the right thing by our employees and their families, we’ve noticed a better level of engagement amongst the team and the staff are definitely more motivated and as a result, more productive.”
GGM is a specialist supplier of tractors and high-quality professional land-based equipment for commercial and domestic use across the North-West, Cheshire and Merseyside, with depots in Haydock and Colne. With a proven record of delivering a trusted service and exceptional after sales support, driven by a set of deep-rooted values, GGM takes pride in building long lasting customer relationships, based on anticipating needs, solving problems and delivering on time, every time.
Chris Gibson has also welcomed the recent launch of the Living Hours campaign, a major new programme to tackle widespread insecurity over hours, providing workers with at least four weeks notice of shifts, a contract that reflects hours worked and a contract with a guaranteed minimum of 16 hours a week.
The GGM Group has always had a key focus on employee engagement, corporate social responsibility and customer service. The business has recently been reaccredited for ISO accreditation and as a Kuboto gold service dealer, standards which the company has held for a number of years. It has also recently committed to a year’s sponsorship of Greenfingers, a charity which builds therapeutic gardens for children’s hospices.
