Still, many workers complain that it's not enough to live on in London. And many employers actually pay even less by offering no pay for extra work or overtime. So trade unions in the British capital are campaigning for a "living wage" of at least £7, about 10 euros. The Living Wage Unit, set by the mayor of London, calculates the amount that constitutes a living wage. Many employers in the city have bowed to the pressure and call themselves as 'living wage employers'. A report by Katrin Böttger in London.

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When Linus Danielius left Lithuania for London more than a year ago, he had no idea he would be taking part in a demonstration for higher wages and better working conditions. A friend had told him there were plenty of jobs in the British capital. He's been working as a cleaner in the Hilton hotel on Edgware Road ... for 7 euros 50 an hour. For that wage, he's supposed to clean ten to fifteen rooms a day: "The rooms are sometimes really massive and really dirty, and it takes 40, 50 minutes or even an hour to clean one room, so it's really hard to keep up with that pace. Conditions are really hard and you get constant pressure and you are fired for a single misdemeanour. And it's really demoralising for the other staff who are working there."

No-one from the Hilton management wanted to comment to this accusation on camera. A spokesman told us that 7 euros 50 an hour was the statutory minimum wage in Britain, and employers didn't have to pay more. Neil Jameson of the London Citizens Living Wage Campaign doesn‘t agree: "Employers hide behind the minimum wage. They tell us the minimum wage is five-oh-five. We say: So what? It's expensive to live in London, you've got to pay more. The aim of the campaign is the same, for every employer to recognise their responsibility to pay the wage which you need to survive in London, which is seven pounds five an hour at today's prices."

Linus would love to get the equivalent of ten euros an hour. He's given up his job at the Hilton and now cleans offices in the east of London for the same money as before: "We have worse conditions in our country, so basically we work here for five pounds, but because it's really not too much money, you usually end up living very far away from work and you spend a lot of time travelling ... and the accommodation is not good either."

At the Greater London Authority, they're well aware the minimum wage is too low to survive in the capital. John Ross, the authority's director of economic and business policy, supports the campaigners' demands: "We can't make it a legal requirement, only the national government can. What we aimed to do was first to establish a figure which we calculated as carefully as we could. The minimum wage is a very good concept. All the scare stories about it, such as that it would lead to a lot of unemployment and so on, were completely false."

More and more companies in London are giving in to the demands for higher pay. Just a few months ago, accountants at auditors KPMG raised wages for six hundred cleaning staff to ten euros an hour as Graham Palmer of KPMG explains: "One of the values that you get from paying rather more than just the minimum is that you can reasonably expect much better service from the people that you employ. Because they feel that they're being treated well, they're being rewarded well, they're being incentivised, and as as result, it's what we call a win-win."

Linus hopes he will be able to find a job that pays more than the minimum wage soon: "You get a feeling you're really not a part of society, but someone far, far, far below. Someone who can be slapped around, can be fired everywhere and so on. Basically, it's a franchise part of society."

All the same, Linus doesn't want to return to Lithuania, because he still dreams of making a better life in England.