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.

Well, I was earning £30k in 2008. Was recently offered a job for £30k and asked for more. The agency told me I was being greedy.

scaryclown I agree with this to a certain extent. The last company I worked for only promoted the people who had been there the longest. These people delegated all the work they had, and did nothing. Then anyone with an ounce of intelligence got sick of doing more work for less pay and moved on, thus the problem got worse.

If your employer pays you less than £20,000 they are laughing at you, and you should be underperforming.

1. Commitment is two way
2. Motivation comes from focussing to work hard and then having choices and/or money in the bank.
3. Most people, though, are just giving away all their time(and life) to eat, sleep, dress and work. I have to resent myself every lunch time because if I dare spend more than £1 average on lunch, I can't pay basic basic bills. I struggle to

English girl - worth remembering that in 1996 house prices were still recovering from the earlier crash and there were a lot less graduates available for employers.

There is an element of immigration having an effect - but it's more that more and more jobs requirer lower souls

Lower souls?!?

Sorry toddler got phone!

Jobs require lower skills so easier to replace people with those without experience. It doesn't matter if you can't retain staff.

Just wait till the machines replacing the existing and remaining retail and manufacturing jobs. It is already happening. For example china is losing factories as more and more robots are used. They even build a new factoring in Germany for addidas or reebok because it is cheaper than in china. Amazon new warehouse in the U.K. will also be very high tech. Then there is self driving cars which is on the brink of a breakthrough to common use. These low skills jobs are all doomed (except in care) but we aren't training our workforce to deal with it unlike Germany.

This makes me so cross aswell. Same pay as 1985!!

scaryclown now you really would struggle to get more than 1% growth , with interest rates negligible and stock market high.

People are talking about a basic income standard. How is that to be funded?

Meanwhile we all need to pull our weight. You know which companies you should not buy from. It is a start.

I'm actually quite surprised by what some PP used to earn and saying it's not changed much. Between 1993-96 I earned £40 a week. Literally a pound an hour. I'm glad that's illegal these days.

Yes wages have stagnated. The job I left school to do paid 18k in 1996 for a school leaver. Now I see it advertised (same job, same place) at 22k and a graduate with some experience is preferred. The flat I bought a few years after that has gone up 400% since 1996 (although I didn't buy it then I just looked at records) I've kept my own records of council tax and gas water etc and they have gone up about 30% over 10 years.

My first job after uni was on 75 pounds a week, in 1990 ish. I lived at home and so my expenses were low. At the time I thought it was fine. When I look back I realise how low it was, and now with min wage I'd earn that in about a day. Two shifts in the pub and my daughter earns that, my friends school age son earns more by working part time in Tescos.

Different where I work. I recruit PAs in a top professional services firm in the city and a few have just left for new jobs paying £48k whereas 10 years ago the same job would have paid about £32k. We are considering increasing our salaries to around £45k to not have an exodus.
I do find at junior levels that people in their first admin position are paid the same as I was back in 2004 which is crazy but once you start progressing the salary increases are considerable.

Also employees are less loyal - you can spend a fortune on training - and they leave.

But employees have no reason at all to be loyal to employers, because there isn't an employer in the country who would hesitate to make an employee redundant if the circumstances suited them.

Also, I often see threads on mumsnet discussing the huge disparity between the top and bottom earners and often people say things like 'I get paid a lot and there is a lot of stress that goes with it because hundreds of people's jobs are dependent on me getting it right'. Yet I don't think there is a 'top manager' in business who would hesitate to do away with the jobs of every single one of their underlings if they could.

If eg Chief Executive of huge clothing chain hypothetically thought one day 'I've worked out how we can have zero staffing costs!' do you think he/she would say 'oh, no, these people need jobs, they have to pay their bills'. Or would he/she say 'I can get rid of 1000s of staff on minimum wage and make all our shops self service and unmanned. I'll put this to the board at the next meeting. We can agree that I get a bonus of £ XXX million and the rest of the increase in profits goes to the shareholders'. He would have slept happily in his bed that night, safe in the knowledge that his profits would increase, and thousands of his employees would have had sleepless nights wondering how they were going to find a new job when everyone else is looking for one at the same time.

invisible I'm well aware of the crash and did benefit from it. The point is that if I was starting out now I wouldn't have the same opportunity to get on the ladder as graduate salaries are no longer desirable. I do think we've done a disservice to a whole generation of school leavers by encouraging going on to HE regardless of aptitude, intelligence, ambition and desire to learn. We've sold them a dream of walking into a graduate job on a great salary but the reality is many, many graduates are working in minimum wage jobs. Those that have graduate jobs still aren't earning great salaries as the pool is so huge that employers don't need to offer much to attract candidates. I hope this madness ends before Ds leaves school and we're in a position where there are real opportunities for school leavers - not just uni or minimum wage.

It's not so much that we need more housing. Its that buy to let, and landlords, need regulating. Houses round here no longer go to families. The buy to let landlords snap them up. And then charge extortionate rents. Then remortgage against that house and go for another as a cash buyer, so they buy the house over the family again. I don't know what the answer is, but the rental market is insane.

The fuck..
I can make £30k increase by £3k just by starting an internet shop, or buying a property and letting it out, or by having bought Euros, or gold, or tech stocks.

What the hell are you talking about?!?!

no union power is a big reason why it has happened. look forward to further decline. remember that next time you read about unions and strikes in the daily fail.

scaryclown

I also struggle to understand how 1% growth target would be a challenge.

If your employer pays you less than £20,000 they are laughing at you, and you should be underperforming.

I am a graduate with twenty years work experience behind me. I have never earned £20k in all my working years. Neither have most of my friends (also graduates). My husband is a similar age, also a graduate, and works in a highly skilled technical field, and even his basic salary is only around £23k (although that is only the basic, he does actually earn a lot more than that due to getting paid for call outs etc).

There are areas of the UK where salaries are very low. And yes, housing costs in these areas are a fraction of what they are in London, but they're not so low that a salary of £20k is generous.

Staff training is a necessary running expense. You only have to look at the massive fuckup that is the NHS computer system to see why training is critical.

If you have a high turnover then something is wrong with the way the company is run. Stop blaming the staff and look into it.

treaclesoda what technical area is your DH in? And where are you? Graduates straight from university starts around £25k outside London from all the ads I have seen.

The problem lies in the pay gap between lowest paid workers and the ceos. That has increased enormously and means we are going towards a society where you are either super rich or dirt poor. This is facilitated by the demonizing of the poorer members of siciety as scroungers.

englishgirlapproximately it's worse than that..you have senior people, educated in the 1950s for whom computers are a new thing, having no possible way of understanding how much more knowledgeable and competent younger graduates are. Many senior staff can't understand what they could get out of these people, and so undervalue them, whilst at the same time distorting their.judgement of their own abilities to keep their own salaries high. I worked in HE with managers who couldn't work out a fucking three stage process flow who were on £40 and £50k a year, who thought junior admin staff who were business administration graduates were stupider than they were (public school Russell group arts graduates). They literally couldn't understand process flows that are simple bread and butter to customer service operations, so they blanked out all the sensible suggestions because they simply couldn't understand them, cocked up the process every year, and kept employing people like them to take it over. Utter incompetence, but that is the public school and class distorted system we operate in. My manager on £60k said that the kind of survey question you give to contact centre juniors from school was 'way too hard and incomprehensible to me and I have a phd' its totally frightening how our public school output think they are cleverer than the rest...but struggle with flowcharts, calculations, time reporting, that is simple to an average comprehensive school kid doing a-levels or lower.

Genuinely scary

DJBaggySmalls the NHS problem was self inflicted with the lack of funding and priority to IT upgrades. It was a bug that was patched 2-3 months ago. NHS runs a lot of windows that are out of the support period. In other words no more security patches from windows. I can understand if a few staff laptop were affected. But the scale of the affection show it is not an oversight for a few machines, but a wide scale lack of patching.

It isn't a problem with staff training. If you are referring to the wannacry worm that shut down the hospitals yesterday.