Forget UKIP, Tories or labour This party is Britain's future!!

[ReallyTired]

thepublandlord.com/

Maybe they should be represented in the TV debates. Free UK party certainly are more interesting than the rest of them!

When I left school there was no minimum wage. I worked as a kitchen assistant in a pub for six months and earnt £3.50 an hour for a 39 hour week. The pub had to raise the money offered to attract someone to do the job. It was enough to pay rent for a room in a shared house in south west London and live. To put it into context rent took just less half my take home income in 1994.

Looking on rightmove a houseshare in the same area would be £625 per month or roughly 70% of the minimum wage. Costs have risen faster than wages. In real terms wages have fallen.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25759780

I don't think that individual immigrants themselves are to blame for low pay. Its the affect of increasing the number of applicants for jobs. The internet makes it easier to advert a job to a far greater number of applicants whether they are in Poland or Newcastle. Ease of immigrantion and the internet has made it possible for more people to apply for a job than ever before.

"
Thank you for clarifying. What you are describing are problems with the British education system, though, not with immigration."

How much education do you need to do an unskilled job? There are jobs that need no qualfications and the employer is faced with a huge number of applicants who could all do the job. He/she has to find a legally fair way to discrimate. I know someone who applied to clean Portaloos and they had to go through a group interview as if they were applying for a graduate recruitment scheme. The competion for a minimum wage job cleaning crap was unbelievable.

The problem is not education, but the fact that some people are as thick as pigshit. No amount of education is going to give them a work ethic or stop them being stupid. It is understandable that an employer prefers a hardworking Pole with a functioning brain. No one wants a native who speaks in grunts even if they could do the job.

I don't think there are any easy answers. Many immigrants are hard working worthwhile people. I don't think that ending immigration is the answer.

Yes, immigration increases competition for jobs, which can affect the lowest skilled (balance varies according to state of economy).

However, that still doesn't change the NMW.

The argument being advanced was that the "rich get richer" because of wage suppression caused by immigration.

No one's shown that's actually happening, because NMW prevents wage suppression (past a certain level, which will be reached anyway in a recession).

PausingFlatly The NMW is nowhere near enough. It is not a living wage.

Jobs that in the past would have attracted more than the NMW are now NMW jobs. A lot of NMW jobs require people to have qualifications when they did not in the past. For example a nursery nurse needs NVQ level 2.

Wages in the UK have decreased in real terms.

The UK has had a terrible decline in wages.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23655605

This partly caused by the economic downturn. I don't think that immigration is the only factor, but there is definately far more competition for jobs than twenty years ago.

Please show how the NMW has been set by immigration!

And you're completely muddling up increased demand for quals, with what people get paid.

In the past, a nursery nurse would have had few qualifications, and been badly paid.

Now, they are required to have qualifications (outcome of "paper quals for all" philosophy), and will be badly paid.

They're doing the same job, and being paid the same amount. So, still not related to immigration, is it?

There HAS been a decline in average wages, but in the long term much of that is because of the UK's middle-ranking jobs in manufacturing and services are being shipped overseas.

Not because of people coming here to do them.

In the shorter term the recession has also had a very significant impact.

If all this is being caused by immigration, you're going to be hard-pushed to explain why Germany, part of the same EU, has seen wages RISE by 2.7% (according to your link).

I should remember that immigration is to politics and economics, as homeopathy is to medicine.

Homeopathy (ie psychosomatic soothing) can have genuine healing effects on some people. It just doesn't achieve anything like the effects true-believers claim for it.

Similarly, immigration/emigration (labour movement) is a genuine feature that affects economies. It just isn't magically to blame for everything we don't like.

It's a pity that Tinks has flounced off, cos this is the perfect riposte.

1. The NMW is so low that benefit is an aggressive competitor to it.
2. Wages became depressed as personal debt was used to improve circumstances rather than upward pressure on employers.
3. An increased culture of blaming the individual for being on a low wage rather than the employer for paying it led to people seeing other solutions than pressurung employers.
4. Banks and shareholders happily kept the cash freed up by low wages unchallenged.
5. And then lent it back to employers, meaning they were largely paying more for money their shareholders and banks had removed from the equation.
6. But employers invested in things other than their workforce.. who weren't conplaining, but were all taking on debt instead.. effectively subsidising their employer.

7 BUT employers weren't paying their employees enough to buy goods and services, so when the debt ran out, there was nt enough money in pay packets to allow employers the income they need to pay shareholders, debt repayments and keep their staff motivated.

1. So we have a crisis led by everyone saving costs and the banks taking all the profit out of circulation.
2. Supermarkets become the biggest employers in the country, and the largest minimum wage employers.

10. But their staff can't afford to buy mid or premium often 11. So the market trends to lowest cost. 12. Low cost food markets are used to justify reduced pay rises.. and a reduced minimum wage...

Its called a vicious circle.

Employers are able to demand paper qualifications for unskilled NMW jobs because there are so many candidiates to choose from. Greater movement of people is a factor causing wages to be depressed even in jobs that cannot be shipped abroad like cleaning. The increase in people looking for work is partly caused by more women in the workplace. In the 1970s women were expected to give up work once they had children. More women looking for work has increased competition and made it harder for men to find work. However most people see the benefits of women in the workplace as worthwhile.

Immigration has many benefits for the UK, but it's niave to suggest there are no downsides. There are downsides in allowing women with small children to be in the work place as well.

boney and pausing, yes it was an ironic statement.

That is exactly the point I was putting across Random. I am not trying to 'sell' the Green Party, I was just asking why on earth if you are going to waste your vote would you vote for a party with absolutely no morals. The followers of these people are predominatly really thick. I actually had someone say to me the other day that the Muslims were killing people because of "do gooders and the stupid human rights policy that meant we couldn't kick them all out of the country"! This, is your average UKIP supporters view.

Fortunate, then, that nobody is trying to suggest there are no downsides to immigration. It's always swings and roundabouts.

But nor is it magically the cause of everything you don't like.

In particular, Tinks' belief that immigration is to blame for the rich getting richer is EXACTLY what the likes of Farage want her to believe. The whole point of scapegoating is to point the finger away from the real causes.

We're not helping anyone (except those rich) by swallowing that line.

I live in Thanet South. I can't wait for the election now! A poll on the local paper's website yesterday had him as set to gain 55% of the vote (although in reality it won't happen).
It's a stroke of absolute genius.
The other candidates range from uninspiring to scary (guess which one I'm scared of?) and for every vote he gets, it's one that UKIP don't get. I don't believe he will get votes from Con/Lab voters - but he is giving UKIPpers a run for their money.

Tinks, "We're voting UKIP because we're voting for change" was what people in Rochester were saying during the by-election, according to my friend there.

They voted in exactly the same man who'd been the Tory MP.

Wearing a different tie.

Not only that, Pausing but a man interviewed in the street on the local news said "He might as well have a go because the last one was useless". Cue me and OH shouting at the TV in unison "It's the same bloke, for God's sake!"