To disagree with the £10 minimum wage policy ?

[Spice22]

This is a genuine question - I've been reading some of the policies and I can't quite decide how I feel about this.

I have 2 key problems ;

1. Won't prices for everything just go up anyway, meaning there's no real change and people will still need tax credits?

1. My biggest concern if I'm honest. Will this not devalue professions? Currently, a cleaner may earn £7 and a programmer , for example, may earn £13 an hour. If the minimum wage rises to £10, there will be a £3 differential between someone who has gained qualifications and someone who is in a MW job. I really don't see many companies increasing the wage of the professional when they are faced with a huge bill to increase the wage of the MW worker. So why would anyone go to uni? Especially when they can work overtime and easily outearn the ones who did?

AIBU and why?

Zany you might think it's not worth more, personally, I'd go for the extra £2ph, and others probably would as well.

Eight hour day at an extra £2ph equals £16 per day extra. That's almost £6,000 extra per year.

That £6k extra pa would come in handy to help pay off the enormous student loan debt.

It depends on may circumstances though doesn't it, it took me 6 years and cost me thousands of pounds to qualify in my job so the salary I earn has to reflect that for me to want to do that.

I only said if you can afford not to you may not bother not that everyone feels that way, if you read the rest of my post there are other issues, not just whether you want to earn a pound or two more. How would you feel if you were in a team leader role and all your staff were put onto the same wage as you?

I am conflicted on this but due to my personal experience within small businesses I just can't see it's a good idea.

If you earn under the student loan pay back amount you wouldn't pay it back anyway surely?

The starting salary for a nurse/midwife is £21k, just over £10 an hour, sometimes less for allied health professionals

Surely, that is an argument in favour of raising the salary for midwives, not one for paying other people less?

It's not about 'deserving more', etc, but they train for 3 years plus and since last year they now receive no bursary, and must pay their own fees, which means getting into around £60k of debt.

Yeah, and I believe this is part of a bigger plan to drive midwives out of business so that male doctors can dictate how women give birth.

Midwives having more costs is not the same as just earning minimum wage; it makes it very risky or impossible to work in that job.

There's lots of people who study philosophy or something, and cannot ever hope to earn a living wage, and they still do it. (And then work as taxi drivers ...)

Pretty sure there'd be enough midwives if they managed to make a living. It is just plain not being able to afford a job that drives people away from it.

Sure, there's probably quite some people in manager positions who are just in it for the money, but wouldn't we be better off without them?

I am quite sure we would be better off without people who become teachers because it is paid so much better than other jobs, if instead we got people who actually want to be teachers and managed to afford going to university because their parents got paid a living wage.

donajimena I can only assume that the people giving me a hard time really don't understand the struggle of running a business, the vast majority of companies in the UK are small companies, whilst there are directors and CEOs on many hundreds of thousands they are the minority. Like you I can't afford to pay staff a minimum wage of £10 an hour, my business would go under and then that's 5 of us not working.
I risk losing my home if I don't make enough money
I would feel responsible if others lost their job
I am the one with sleepless nights and ridiculous hours to get the company started.
I am a sole trader so any company debt is my debt
I really hope it's worth it all in the end both financially and for my own personal wellbeing to go through all this and earn the same amount as someone who hasnt...

Its about £4k a year, before tax/Ni/pension not £6k, in real terms less than £3k per year potentially.

Weed - you will never get any other response on here really, straight away I am jumped on, I have never said people don't deserve more money but just that I can't see how it would work.

Lawyers doctors teachers all earn much more then £10 per hour.

My SIL is a care worker with very complex secondary school aged kids in a special unit but only get the bare minimum wage. I think that's wrong considering how skilled her unskilled job is.

Cleaners get £10-£12 an hour where we are.

Of course it is, but healthcare wages have been frozen for a long time, they aren't suddenly going to increase professional wages, while also having to fork out extra income for the newer higher minimum wage of the non-professional staff. Where is this extra money coming from? The NHS is already struggling as it is.

And I don't think anyone goes into teaching for the money. But you wouldn't choose to put yourself under all that stress and debt to earn less than your assistant, surely?

Quickie - you are absolutely right, there is a serious mismatch of what is considered skilled/unskilled

MrsDV I found your comments about people 'having a great time' at uni really patronizing. I'm sorry but if you haven't gone to uni yourself to study for a degree then don't try and put people down by acting like it's easy.

I don't know why people have to crawl out of the woodwork to try and have a dig at people for getting an education. Go and do a degree first and then tell everyone how much fun it was.

Crazycatgal - 40% pass rate to get through the first year = easy.

*crazycat agree completely about that, especially at this final stage of my degree. Nothing fun about it at all !

user first year doesn't count towards your degree. Companies want minimum 2.1 - 60%+ aswell as experience. Not easy.

User yeah that's great but the first year of a degree doesn't count. Also you do know that it's much harder to get 40% at degree level than 40% at school right?

It's not the doctors and lawyers that would concern me. It's the people in professional jobs that barely scrape £10 an hour I'd be most concerned about; teachers for example. I was an fe lecturer, I was on zero hours, I was switched to a contract and my hourly rate went down to approximately £12 per hour when taking into account the extra work I would need to do outside of work hours. So why would someone go to uni, rack up debt, take on responsibility and stress, when I could be a teaching assistant with zero responsibility in the same classroom with the same kids for £10 per hour? schools will have to increase the pay proportionately otherwise all their professionals are going to leave and stack shelves in tesco. There are many times in my career when the only thing stopping me from doing this was my pay.

I think a lot depends on the business. Many could pay more to those at the bottom of the ladder without it devaluing the experience or qualifications of those at the top because of the huge pay gaps already existing between them.

The starting salary for a nurse/midwife is £21k, just over £10 an hour, sometimes less for allied health professionals

Surely, that is an argument in favour of raising the salary for midwives, not one for paying other people less?

Quite. It's also an argument for free higher education, particularly for sectors where there are staff shortages, like healthcare. But what's this government doing? Abolishing bursaries.

Yes, very easy on an arts degree, maybe 2-3 x two hour lectures each week and lots of free time.

But not so easy doing nursing/midwifery/teaching where you have to work full time on placement while studying for exams and writing essays.

And really, with a third, you wouldn't stand much chance in a competitive job market, most people want to get a decent job, so not many would aim for just a pass.

I'm a TA. Ive just had a 1% pay rise after not having one for about 5 years. I earn £8.54 an hour. That's a £1 more than minimum wage.

Don't get me wrong, I love my job ( though every year I wonder if I'm going to still have one the next year), but I do almost everything a teacher does, I train with them, I deliver planned learning and I'm responsible for making sure my groups are organised, with all the necessary equipment, and have to be aware of safeguarding children, etc,etc.

But I could just work in a shop instead and be paid almost the same.

Qualified teachers will be on less than minimum wage if it rises to £10 an hour. The hours they put in and what they are paid will mean they will be paid less than minimum wage for most main scale teachers.

I can that teachers will have to be paid more. Numbers of applicants will drop and wages will have to be increased to attract workers.

jam

Why don't you?