Marks and Spencer’s chief executive, Marc Bolland, has been confronted by one of his employees demanding that he pay staff the living wage.

The executive, whose pay package this year totalled £2.1m, was presented with a T-shirt on Friday bearing the slogan “simply pay your M&S staff living wage” by 27-year-old shop worker Oliver Knowles. Bolland declined to wear it, but did take it with him. Knowles was told to go home after the incident, which took place in the Covent Garden store.

“We need the living wage to live,” Knowles told the Guardian. “People I work with work two jobs to survive – it is not right. I did it because Marc Bolland runs M&S, so he is the best person to speak to.

“I just wanted to get the message across that people cannot survive on what we are paid. I told him that these wages are poverty wages. He said he would look into it. But I have been told that by other managers. Nothing changes.”

Knowles said he was paid £8.26 an hour, 89p below the London living wage calculated by the Greater London Authority and supported by the capital’s mayor, Boris Johnson. Based on a 40-hour week, the shortfall would amount to more than £1,800 a year.



Knowles said the pay rate had led him to resign and look for a new job. He was serving out his notice period when he confronted Bolland.

Knowles called Bolland’s pay package a disgrace, asking: “How much harder than me does he work? Why the difference, what does he do more than me? We have had our 15p wage increases, but my rent and travel costs are going up – as will food prices, as they well know.”

Bolland, who is understood to have spoken to Knowles and to have kept the T-shirt in his office, was awarded a bonus of £596,000 this year after the retailer posted its first profit rise in four years.

He has refused to accept an increase in his basic salary of £975,000 since he joined the company in 2010 and his earnings are well down on his total pay package for his first year in the job, which was worth £4.4m.

His bonus this year was not the highest awarded to M&S executives. Steve Rowe, who is in charge of the retailer’s food division, received an add-on worth £653,000 after his department’s revenues grew to £5.2bn. The smallest bonus went to John Dixon, who leads M&S’s general merchandise division and was given an extra £217,000. All bonuses were cancelled in 2014 amid falling profits.

An M&S spokesman said: “We always welcome constructive employee feedback and have a number of channels to support this. A campaign T-shirt was accepted in our store from an employee. We would not comment further on individual employees.”