To think it is not that easy to 'get a better job'

Aah. I suppose i think of my area as nice although its described as the affordble/rough bit of my borough, and its a long old way to head somewhere not nice thats cheaper enough to offset commuting costs.

We really, really struggled with recruitment as people cant afford to live here and can get the same nmw job closer to home without the added hassle and cost of a commute. Its a genuine issue.

When rent in a nice area could be well over £1000pm?

My area is not nice at all and rent for a tiny flat is still about £900pm. But people in the low paid jobs still have to live here or those jobs wont get done. Not everyone wants to or can live in houseshares. Would you want to be house sharing in your middle age?

They might be able to afford the bare essentials but it would be a crap life and people in the lowest paid roles deserve to have the nicer things like everyone else does. Otherwise what is the point of living?

I meant

they don’t need to live in a nice area to work in a nice area 🙄

You literally said they couldn't live in a nice area? Or did you mean they could live in a nice area with no holidays/cars etc.

Full time NMW
£1750 net a month

they can do it

I’m qualified and very experienced in my role

im trying to get a better job

age is very much against me and the out of hours that wasn’t a requirement is now expected I just now longer have the energy to do all those hours

it’s not always easy and one thing people rarely think about is confidence, lacking in self belief and confidence is such a struggle for so many people

I think the issue with this is a lot of 'nice areas' still need a huge number of minimum wage staff to keep them nice. So if they cant live there, how does it work. There's only so far people can commute for minimum wage as commuting costs are high.

I do understand what you are saying and I think a lot of minimum wage jobs have absolutely no progression, the issue is I also think a lot of people chose to stay in these jobs because they get comfortable with the familiarity. If you’re a skilled individual and have been in a MW role for several years without progression it’s often time to start looking elsewhere but people don’t want to do that. One of my closer friends is stuck in a MW role with a first class finance degree and she won’t leave because she’s too comfortable there. The management system is one in one out so unless one of them leaves she won’t get a promotion. Moving jobs is scary but I think it would open a lot more doors for people if they recognised they are never going to progress anywhere in their current company.

My DH started off with his cohort in an entry level role 5 years ago and has made great progress quite fast. He met with a few others who started with him the other day and one of them was pretty much on the same salary as when he started. He has spent the last 5 years moving sideways instead of up. Sometimes it’s just a series of bad choices. People forget you need to spend time upskilling all of the time. I understand people don’t want to do this as often it’s hard to get a good work life balance.

Well if they’re like this for their entire life then… well, that’s life!

They can afford to “live”

what they can’t afford to do is live in a nice area; holiday abroad; drive anything aside from an old very modest car and use sparingly; and will need to shop very very frugally

£1750 full time NMW

so yes they can “live”

Full time NMW at 37.5h/week gives you £1730 net per month.
If it's a couple than it's totally liveable wage of £3460 per months for two adults and one child, your childcare would be heavily subsidised. I have no idea about any other possible benefits.

It's much tougher for a single person, rent would be in shared place most likely, but it's still doable. Not life of luxury for sure, but it's a liveable wage still.

ETA: but yes, I agree that NMW should be higher, or possibly personal allowance should be higher. What government could do is to rebalance the books by reducing welfare bill to make UC time limited but increase personal allowance instead so people who are working get more.

Which is fundamentally wrong. The people who post here in desperation (and you'd have to be desperate to lay your life open to critique by some of the people who post on here!) are not looking for what many would term 'a great life', merely to keep a reasonable standard of roof over their head, pay their bills and feed their children without resorting to the food bank. Which when you're working in a job needed by your society, because someone has to care for the elderly, clean, staff shops, labour in construction, is surely the least you can expect. It'd completely unfeasible for society if the only means for people to have the standard of living that enables them to meet their essentials and have some sort of pleasure from their existence is to move out of these type of jobs, because there's not enough of the better ones to go round, and someone needs to do the low paid ones. The answer isn't for everyone to 'better' themselves by leaving their situation, but for the situation they are in to be made better.

You do it self study after they’ve gone to bed, or a cut off time say 8pm. Getting up at 5am to do an hour close to exam periods. It’s not fun but it’s not forever. It also doesn’t have to be the 6-8 years for a degree, there are many professional qualifications that can be covered as self study that don’t include a degree in terms of cost or timing.
I’m just coming out the other side of my qualification and it’s been super hard but it’s been financially worth it in the end. My DD is of an age she understands why I’m doing it and I try to make the most of the time we spend together.

I’m not unskilled, I have a degree but there’s no clear career progression from where I am. Most jobs around me are low paid but I can’t afford to move
I also don’t know what other jobs I can do, and the ones I look at are asking for 2-5 years of experience
also have health issues which leave me with fatigue and need to stick to a short commute

A single person on minimum wage used to be able to afford to live. The cost of housing and living going up and up now means they cant.
That is not their fault and some people simply can not retrain in something or upskill. How is someone on min wage with no money left over at the end of the month meant to pay for courses?
Not everyone has family around them to support them either.

I think just as bad as "get a better job" is "do more hours" or "get a second job" when someone is already working 50+ hours to make ends meet. What happened to a work life balance?

But someone working full time on a minimum wage job should still be able to afford to live. Some minimum wage / just above minimum wage jobs are really important for society.

Some people a round pegs in square holes job wise, but it is not that easy to find that round hole if you you have financial responsibilities and commitments, retraining often means giving up an income for a while and most people simply don’t have that luxury. Saying “just upskill/retrain/get a better job” is a bit like saying “let them eat cake”.

Unfortunately

them’s the breaks

if you aren’t capable of doing anything more than a minimum wage job for your entire working career… then yes, you’re not going to have a great life in terms of material and finances

I think one of the issues is more and more jobs are becoming minimum wage jobs or hover just above minimum wage. The expectations for a lot of low paid jobs are huge

I spent time training etc and then minimum wage went up and up and my wage stagnated until they nearly met. I then had to train again. Its like a lifelong thing training, not a one off thing.

And I agree 100% that not everyone can get a better job or the country will collapse and that people in those jobs deserve to be able to afford to live. Not everyone has capacity to train either due to life.

With qualifications including data analysis, what skills do you have your CV? Have you learned PowerBI and similar, these are starting to be requested more and more. Once my currently qualification (2.5 years) finishes next month, my next plan is getting to grips with PowerBI. Whilst I don’t know how to use or build it yet, I know it could make a big impact to what I do

With AI ingraining itself more and more into complex tasks, admin roles are becoming significantly fewer. You need skills that will have you stand out from others

Also think it's odd. I mean I know it makes sense for that individual - it would make their life easier. But then who would do the minimal wage jobs? It doesn't really address the bigger issue.

Always wonder of the 'get a better job then' people what their life would look like if they didn't have access to the services that we all use, week in, week out, that rely on a workforce of low paid workers.

Regardless of individual circumstances, we need more workers at the bottom of the pyramid than the top, no point having 30 managers if they've no one to manage is there? The work isn't going to get done. Makes more sense to have 29 working and one managing. But that seems to mean that the 29 working 'can't be arsed' and the manager is a hero for being the one who got the promotion.

I think some people resent the fact that they need the services of lower paid workers to keep their lives turning or their job productive and conveniently forget that without them, both wouldn't happen.

I'm quite happy working hard and living a modest life, but it's come to the point where you struggle to just survive on the lower end of the wages spectrum, while people rely on the work your doing but also tell you it's not worth doing and that you are lazy and uninspired for doing it. We've got recruitment issues in just about every low paid sector, and people are not shy in bemoaning the effect that has on the services they use, can people genuinely not join the dots and see the utter lack of respect and conditions are a factor in that?

While it's possible for anyone to have the rags to riches story, if everyone did then we'd soon find life grinding to a halt pretty quickly.