Why are wages so fucking bad in 2017? They're the same as the 80's/ 90's?

[BaydreamDeliever]

My mum moved to London in the 80's and worked for a high end shop. I've just had a look at the position they are advertising for at the moment, and it's a touch above min wage. My mum was able to afford to live on her wage back then, even though it wasn't big bucks, there is no way I could live on what they are offering today.

Wages are basically the same as years ago if you are in a lot of jobs. And the culture of 'internships' has further fucked everything. I see loads of these paying nothing or paying maybe £50 a day, demanding quite specific software skills. Entry level doesn't seem to mean entry level anymore.

I get that there always must be winners and losers in society as it's structured now, but seriously how can things churn on with workers being paid such shit money? If they do away with tax credits or housing benefit - what then? What will happen? I don't get it and I'm scared thinking of it. I'm educated, have a bit of experience in certain fields but not in any that pay reasonably. There must be millions like me in that same boat.

Welldoneme
Probably due to immigration, too many people chasing job roles which forced down wages in real terms.

No, it was Conservative PM John Major who forced through the Maastricht Treaty, Labour opposed it and the Right labelled them as racists. Since then, no politician has dared speak out against immigration.
And it was Thatcher who sold off council Housing.

We have a little local bookshop. Still, just surviving.

Benefits to us: a pretty shop on the high street, knowledgeable staff, a provider of Saturday jobs to local kids for years, help with school textbooks and birthday presents, tax payers.

Disadvantages - books cost more than at Amazon, you have to actually go there so can't shop at 3am, they don't have such a wide range as at Amazon - although they can order.

Consequence
Short-sighted people go to Amazon. Tax receipts fall, High Street dies - charity shopsmini-Tescos and more flats, no jobs for locals but you can be a warehouse picker for Amazon where you work on zero hours, have no training and no security.

Then you get complaints about evil Shareholders not paying tax and no jobs or decent pay for our kids.

Wages are low in this country because labour productivity is poor. Until this is improved wage growth is always going to be slow.

Minimum wage dragged many jobs down to that level.
Tax credits allowed the problem to be masked for, in the main, people with children.
Unrestricted skilled and unskilled immigration reduced competative pressure on wages.
High benefits, mainly housing benefit compounded the issue.
It will take a generation to unravel, Brown and Blair set out to create a client state of people in work reliant on benefits, servitude to the government to survive.
Thats how the Left works.
See Ussr, Cuba, N Korea for eg.

I had a 10% pay cut 6 or 7 years ago (negotiated to enable our organisation to survive). This has never been re-instated and woop-di-do we had our first wage increase since then in April. 1%.

So many things missing from our shopping list these days, and holidays more constrained. Stopped having a cleaner ( two f/t working parents).

But it isn't our day to day money that worries me, we are just about managing, it is the future for the Dc. Cost of housing, student loans, big economic downturn, no chance of work beyond the U.K. in Europe,

In previous generations enterprising young people could seek work in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, if work dried up here. No more; they have strict points based systems now, and only take immigrants for certain jobs.

My Dc chose MFL options from Yr 7 onwards in order to make working in Europe an option.

If we are just about managing now, what on earth will it be like for our kids?

(I say managing but we aren't. Boiler is on its last legs and we have damp we can't afford to fix)

My daughter is on the minimum wage on a 12 hour contract. If she gets a second job they will sack her because she has to be available to work at the drop of a hat! There are barely any jobs where we live due to lack of investment.

She will never be able to have her own home at this rate. Since she doesn't work 30 hours a week she gets no benefits anyway. This is slavery. You have to work to eat but you are prevented from working hard enough to better yourself. :(

I have to work until I am well over 66. I am currently working as a carer because of the lack of jobs available and employers generally don't want to employ older women. I have not been able to afford a visit to the hairdressers for two years now and there is no sign of any improvement. :(

If we had no immigration and no tax credits, what would happen in the UK?

Would wages rise in the longer term?

Labour productivity is poor because morale is hitting rock bottom - because all below a certain level are having to work harder and harder for less and less while we see those at the higher end get more and more for less. We can see ourselves being turned into slaves, and why should we support that?

We are all in a downward spiral. The system needs rethinking. Maybe basic income, which other more forward-looking EU states are experimenting with.

A interviewed and hired a polish man for a position of manager of his business. He dis nit want to earn more than £200 per week as he had a wife and children and would not be able to apply for benefits. I believe housing benefit and tax credit also family allowance. "Freind" who is a millionaire was bragging that he only had to pay him £200 per week and he was a brilliant worker. The system is fucked.

A freind

Wages are low in this country because labour productivity is poor. Until this is improved wage growth is always going to be slow.

In the US, the increase in productivity and wages rose in synchronicity until the 1970s. Since then, productivity continues to rise but wages have plateaued. It's part of the broken social contract that has alienated people from big business/government.

goo.gl/images/VDk7GO

I'm a skilled professional and thanks to inflation, I'm now paid 10% less than I was 10 years ago and bonuses are a tiny fraction of what they were. My colleagues and I are all obliged to work harder just to see our standards of living fall.

Since then, no politician has dared speak out against immigration.

Bollocks. Some of them do little but. You can oppose immigration and still know that this is completely incorrect.

Workers are disengaged.

The majority have to work much harder for a lot less. There is no security and company pensions are virtually non-existent. Companies do not want to take people on and train them. You are expected to have all the skills for the job and, if you haven't, then you're easily replaced so get the push.

It will be interesting to see where Brexit takes us. The tide is turning and people are fed up.

Bit concerning to see a few posters labelling immigration as a major cause in the face of all evidence to the contrary

As has been confirmed repeatedly and explained in minute detail in the report by the Bank of England, an increase in immigration of a whopping 10% contributes to a wage reduction of max 2% only in the lowest/unskilled job sectors and that is all.

Look at Germany;.higher rate of immigration than UK and 15% higher wage growth relative to UK since financial crisis (data tradingeconomics which captures all economic stats from all countries).

Why do people persist in blaming a factor which is proven not to be the cause?

Why do people not chose to hold the government responsible for employment policy such as the tax system zero hours which facilitates this? For unbalanced sectoral split in industries that aren't keeping up with the pace of technology or replacing jobs impacted by that.

Is it really more acceptable for you to dodge the facts using xenophobia, racism and ostrich-tactics than face facts and hold the government accountable? Astonishing and deeply depressing.

For anyone interested in the facts, herewith original BoE report and a simpler discussion article from full fact.

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2015/swp574.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwimyqnVqezTAhWHK8AKHTZoC4QQFggfMAA&usg=AFQjCNGHzQ8Juzc96zz4cr7l9NBvzyHG-Q&sig2=V2gZQqT8Jxl7UOCYNt09KQ" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2015/swp574.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwimyqnVqezTAhWHK8AKHTZoC4QQFggfMAA&usg=AFQjCNGHzQ8Juzc96zz4cr7l9NBvzyHG-Q&sig2=V2gZQqT8Jxl7UOCYNt09KQ

fullfact.org/immigration/does-immigration-reduce-wages/

When low paid jobs pay the same as benefit money then obviously productivity and morale is poor.
When Helen works 45 hrs packing biscuits alongside Sophie who works 16 hrs topped up to a greater wage by tax credits, is Helen going to be productive?

It's crap. Warnings have just been issued for more of the same due to Brexit as the country starts to realise the shit storm created.

DH works for the Civil Service - he has just come out of a 10 year pay freeze - top of his scale so actual gross salary figure is the same as it was 10 years ago. We have seen our family income eroded steadily by inflation over the years and thank god we paid off the mortgage some time ago - though to be fair, lately, mortgage interest was peanuts compared to 1990.

I work for minimum wage now. When minimum wage came in I earned over it, but wages did not go up when min wage went up, and ended up equal - so now my wage has at least increased with this latest rise.

Tax credits have had a big impact on wages.
(keep paying the shareholders, the Government will pick up the slack)

Posters on another thread would have it that our wages are low because we didn't bother getting a decent education....not my view but as long as views like that persist the culture of low pay for certain jobs will continue. House prices and the cost of living continue to go up, yet for the majority of paye the same hadn't happened with wages. Ask yourself who is getting this extra money....

universal basic income is the answer. There are simply not enough jobs to go around that pay enough to supply housing and a reasonable standard of living. We have to be more radical and re think the way society works.
Jobs may be something we do for a decade or two of our lives to save for other purposes. It should be a liberation.

It really isn't due to immigration, it's due to a realisation by businesses that people in jobs below senior management will pretty much accept what is offered. Unions used to help by working to understand the collective value of labour in the negotiation, and move wages closer to it (for example if all the staff in my local Costa Drive through stopped working, it would lose 100,000 a month, so even if they re-recruited and it took a month, the collective labour value to the business is very much higher than the few hundred they are paying for it. Staff are the most fundamental part of most businesses that pay min wage, so their negotiation power is very strong, collectively, but businesses know that individually, people will struggle.

The other factors are dramatically increased sophistication in assessing not market value, but behavioural value. Businesses don't go 'oh I wonder what a member of admin staff should get according to the value to the business, and the level of tasks involved' they go 'if we can find someone with basic skills who is underemployed and miserable at Min wage, then we can just say this job is more interesting and get someone to do it at Min wage,' it's rare to find people saying 'oh I am looking for work, and this job gives me a £6k increase,but it has tasks in it that only 10% of the population can do, so I want a salary at £42,000. I think they should, but too many other people (again acting individually without consideration of the collective impact) will give it a go for a few years, then get perhaps burnt out otlr pissed off etc and the cycle continues.

If you have a lot of under paid jobs in the market where businesses are trying to get say a role that generates £60k worth to a business, for £15k then businesses benchmark against it.

Where you have agents who asses how much a person's worth is to a project and negotiate on that basis you see more accurately what the value of the market is..which is sort of what good unions do, hence the £45-60k train driver salaries in TFL where the company wanted to pay circa £22.

We need, as a nation, a much better understanding of our worth to a company, and also be prepared to challenge companies and be in conflict with them to get wages closer to their worth to a business.

I"m so tired of hearing of businesses paying staff less than they need to live on, whilst making averages of £600,000 per staff member. People like Google make more than $1,000,000 per employee per year. Amazon has majority staff on mine wage or lower, and makes $500,000 per employee. I am sure Amazon will bleat about how tight their margins are if you challenged them....

The local Amazon warehouse to me recruits at 7.20ph irrespective of skills or abilities.

As an 18yr old I took home £800pm working 35hrs per week in a newspaper's advertising call centre.

As a 48yr old I earn £900pm working 32.5hrs per week as a TA. I certainly work harder than I did then.

I between I worked as a nurse and for a while (2000s) I was earning a good wage working for agencies, probably £400 per week for 20hrs or so. I couldn't earn that now as the hourly rate is lower.

DH is still in nursing (NHS) and fortunately has had some promotions, but even then his wage is only 25% higher than it was 15 years ago.

I worry for my children. I also worry that I'll still have them when they're 30!

Also businesses rarely make, or have the competence to make, opportunity cost decisions. If they have a totally useless incompetent in a job, they rarely understand the cost of that compared to recruiting the best from the market, and so you see teams of absolute duffers getting wages, without any approach to the market to see if the quality goes up if they advertise at a higher rate. So you might have a company with low standards and duffers completely unaware that the market has higher performers in that you aren't reaching. Nobody checks on this, and it's quite frightening. I know from my perspective too that Extremely high quality staff, like I am, are rarely found by businesses and employed at the right level, so there is a withdrawal of labour in effect, but because businesses are unaware of it, they fill roles with lower quality staff by preference and pay less.

I have a degree and work for minimum wage. Of my contemporaries the ones who did best got jobs at 16 to 18 and worked their way up before the financial crisis. But I seem to have been in an uniquely unlucky cohort of graduates.

Not that I think it's better for graduates now, it's just that it's just as bad for those who don't go to uni.

I took a graduate trainee managers job in 1996 on £15500, I've just checked and the same scheme today offers £18000 - on that salary I was able to buy a 3 bedroom house, go on holidays and eat out twice a week, there's no way you could do that on £18k.

We're in a race to the bottom at the moment, there's no desire to make living conditions better for the general population and anyone complaining is just expected to suck it up.

I remember the bitter weirdness of a manager I had who told me that I was better off than him because his £60k salary didn't go up each year, but my £20k one did. His face was a picture when I said 'if you can't get more than 1% growth out of £30,000 spare money a year, then you don't deserve the extra, wanna swap?,'