About half of British workers earn under £15 hour - new Living Wage?

And then everyone bemoans all the shop closures, pub closures, inability to find a decent tradesman, etc., long delays in getting orders, etc etc.

The real problem is that people won't pay the "right" price for things, and because of that, businesses have no choice but to cut corners, cut staff, pay the least they can get away with, etc etc.

Creepybookworm

Thats NMW here - so its illegal

So many threads on here complain about the 'top ups' some low earners receive but when it is suggested wages are raised and more people can be taken off benefits/pay more tax that gets complaints as well.

well said ^

you can't have it both ways

So how do people survive? We are meant to work to pay for things and maybe you know be able to have a meal out etc

Well said!

So many threads on here complain about the 'top ups' some low earners receive but when it is suggested wages are raised and more people can be taken off benefits/pay more tax that gets complaints as well.

You are right in that people want others to do these jobs but not actually live comfortable lives in return.

If a company can not pay a realistic living wage to every employee, its not a viable business.

But if you pay everyone more, prices go up, so people will be no better off. It's basic economics.

When people complain about shareholders they need to realise that it's not individuals holding all these shares. Pension funds, where do you think that money comes from?

That’s not how the economy works. The prices of everything will just go up proportionally so your £15 will buy no more than £11 does now.

Even if that's the minimum worked out that people need to live on? Not saying it is but with COL, min wage is tough to live on alone

No, £31k a year should not be minimum wage. Unless all wages rise accordingly but that will just leads to high inflation and we all
know how well that goes for everyone.

Yes, but what about a higher band nurse/pt/ot/salt who currently gets about £17 an hour? You say it will take time for the rest of salaries to rise. How much time? And where is the incentive to study for 3-5 years to get paid the same as a supermarket checkout person (less, considering student loan repayment)?
I’m not saying people shouldn’t be paid more. But, as ever, everyone is forgetting about the guy in the middle. The government didn’t have money to raise nurses pay to match the inflation levels last year. How likely is it that they will find money to raise every public sector employee’s wage proportionate to NLW?

Massive expansion in housing stock is what we need really tbh.

Companies also shouldn't be allowed to pay out to shareholders while their staff are dependent on tax payer funded benefits because their wages are too low to live on

I think be careful what you wish for here. I’m not able to have children so in reality I’m not entitled to any state benefits, even when I was privately renting on NMW (to be fair this was a few years ago so I don’t know if it’s the case now, but I have a mortgage). If a business needs 10 members of staff it can employ 10 of me and no tax payer benefits, but if it employed 10 single mothers then it would have to pay an awful lot more for those people before the people at the top will get their dividends. I think this will cause a lot of stealth discrimination against parents. I might be wrong but if I can see that despite being on the ‘right’ side of being employed in this situation then business owners will too. Even with not being able to ask about your family position at an interview, this then just potentially widens to women of childbearing age. I think it’s an interesting discussion point but I worry not great in practice.

I once crunched the numbers of Tesco's annual accounts. If the total amount paid out as dividends and wages to the senior Board members was zeroised and instead paid out to the staff, it worked out about £1 per week per employee pay rise. That's how fine the margins are and how the numbers work, i.e. the sheer number of staff they employed! Prices would inevitably have to rise by a large amount to pay all their staff more, which would stoke inflation.

I think minimum wage is a double edged sword. On one side the government introduced it to protect employees and demand this is the absolute minimum someone should be paid to prevent exploitation, but on the other, too many employers looked and thought 'ha - that's at I can get away with paying someone'.

Too many jobs today (advertised on indeed) demand 2years experience, plus qualifications, to only pay NMW and that's is so wrong. NMW should only be given to those starting out - no qualifications, no experience kinda work - fruit picking for example.
IMO, you pay minimum wage, you get minimum employee. Employers need to start paying people their worth.

Funny though that these low waged workers are quite often providing the services that are relied upon, needed and wanted - no one seems to have a problem with using these services to their advantage, for those services being available, complaining that they're not good enough, yet seem to deeply resent those providing them for earning a low wage whilst providing it, calling them failures while using and benefitting from the service they provide.
Oh and don't forget we don't want people doing jobs like social or child care for the money, because they're not in it for the right reasons then. If they're not happily living in poverty and debt while providing a service and grateful for the opportunity, they're in the wrong job.
But they're only in poverty and debt because they're a failure.
And they should just go and get a better job if they need to be topped up with tax payers money because others shouldn't have to subsidise them......... But it's ok for the lower waged workers to subsidise these services by way of not being paid enough to live on, they should just do so quietly and when not required to deliver the service, disappear and not be heard because the better in society don't want to think they might be exploiting people to get the work that they want and need done, done.

It would massively distort the pay bands. If you're a more experienced nurse earning say £8ph more than the lowest bands, that would potentially be cut to £3ph. Why would you bother? Similarly if you're a care supervisor on £14ph and you'll be uplifted to the same rate as the workers you supervise.

To proportionately increase everyone's wage would mean across the board increases of 30%. There's 6 million public sector workers so where's that coming from?

And what do you suppose happens to the cost of goods when a company has to increase its labour bill by 30%? All you do is shift the poverty point from A to B as prices rise and taxes increase.

Gross.

Paula V, senior police, senior hospital bosses etc have blown the idea that these people deserve the wages they get.

"UC reduces by 45p for every extra pound you earn so there's no "big chunk" that you lose, it's very straightforward. There's no limit to hours you can work on UC."

Yes, but I know people that see that 45p as free money they've "lost". It's a mindset. They see it coming off the UC payment and start moaning about it "not being worth it to work"

It's similar to the childcare trap women get into, enabling their husbands to continue working whilst damaging their own careers because "it's not worth me working to pay childcare".

Not popular but the benefit system should be extended for single, childfree people (which now with the rise in working age affects everyone). If wages rise, people get less, it doesn't help anyone. Water and electricity should be re-nationalised, or profits taxed. Share the wealth and investment up north. The S/SE/London wouldn't be in the predicament it is re housing if everything hadn't have been shifted down there from the North in the 70/80's. Get rid of the bedroom tax so the three bed HA housing stock can be put to better use. Families with two children under 10 are stuck in private rents while the three beds get rented on a house share basis, or sold off because they can't house smaller Families in them. Wages are only a part of the issue. Personally I'd put conditions on the amount of hours offered so real jobs are created. Then work towards people being self sufficient, however we'll have another Tory government by then, so people will be put back into poverty.

Oh yes. And on the thread about someone earning a high salary and doing little work, anyone who didn't buy into it was sneered at and told that it was evident that they weren't equipped to get a job like that.

the irony of the persistence of low pay in a capitalist society is that the government ends up paying a huge amount of in-work benefits -so is effectively subsidising business's to pay low wages. i can never get my head round that.

It's a fantastic idea. Would go some way to cutting in work benefits.