To think plenty of people live on a lot less than £297 a week?

[Braveanddifferent]

It's still over £15k a year.

Depends what it has to cover. Mortgage, rent, 10 kids, a partner or maybe you are living at your mum's giving her £50 a week and enjoying the rest.

Found this which gives an insight into London rents

www.home.co.uk/for_rent/london/current_rents?location=london

It's worth mentioning that these cleaners are not employed by the NHS, but by a private contractor, Serco. Serco is not bound by the 1% public sector pay restraint. What have Serco done, given the staff no pay increase!

What is grotesque is the next number that should shock everyone. The average pay of the next 90%, (by stripping out all earnings of the top 10%, including the 1% and 0.1% groups) leaves an annual income of just £12,969. Yes, you read that right. Stripping out the top 10% of average pay, leaves just £12,969 average pay for the remaining 90% of the population.

That IS shocking. What's the type of average used here (mean, medina or mode?) ? And the source if you don't mind?

Ive lived off less and thankfully now we do OK (by no means rich, but managing) so he syou can live off it, but it's not much fun.

Inequalities such as this should concern everyone. Healthy economies are not characterised by huge levels of inequality. Indeed it's seen as one of those markers for a civilisation at a point of decline (from a historical point of view.)

I honestly think we are going to see civil unrest on a large scale within the next 5-10 years. It's like we are going back to feudal times and all the postwar gains are being rolled back.

Race to the bottom mentality.

I would seriously doubt that many families live on less than that when you take housing costs into account, especially in the South.

In a cheap county, as a single person maybe. But two of us currently earning 30k between us with 2 small kids are struggling. With out kids we would survive fine.

What is wrong with people? It's a crap wage for a physically tough job. As someone who's worked in the NHS for 25 years I can tell you cleaners are not youths living it up in their parents home. They are normally middle aged, BME or Eastern European and supporting their families.

The cleaners at Barts are on a week long strike as from 11/7/2017 and I don't blame them

www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jul/11/cleaners-london-hospitals-barts-serco-seven-day-strike-pay

In the case of the public sector, if you paid them a decent salary to start with you wouldn't have to waste extra money on the administration costs of working out and paying them benefits.

LOL at Piglet explaining percentages 😂 Still half are on less than £25k so I completely miss your point

London rents would be impossible on that wage, you would not cover your rent alone before any other expenses. You might manage with a room in a share house, and some cheaper areas perhaps a small one bed, but not with enough left over to live on.

Public sector workers include many highly paid jobs, and some well paid public sector workers perhaps don't realise just how massively superior their pensions are to private sector ones. However, many are also shamefully underpaid, so the comment seems alarming at least without context.

It depends on your circumstances. That wouldn't even cover my mortgage, let alone childcare and bills.

You can rent rooms in shared houses in London for £125 a week. It is perfectly doable on this money, but not much to spare. I know this from experience.
And yes many cleaners are supporting a family.

www.theguardian.com/society/datablog/interactive/2012/jun/22/how-wealthy-you-compared

a few years old, so the "poverty line" would now be set at a slightly higher income

anatida

It was a website called Vox Political i was just googling and it came uo so i am nOtsure how useful the source is

but i do remember reading in variously news articles that the 26k is the median and the mean is much lower...or the other way around, i get confused

*The cleaner was earning £297 working full time in Barts hospital in central London. That's a pitiful wage when you look at housing costs in London.

If adequate cleaning staff can be obtained at that price then it isn't to low. What it enables people to afford is neither here nor there.

There are lots of people in the job market who aren't the only contributing adult in their household, and who therefore can afford to work for less than the minimum cost of running a household.*

"Adequate"? The 1800's called and wondered what was delaying your return? There's a small child stuck up your chimney also but he stopped crying about a day ago so I wouldn't worry too much.

Noone can say the public sector are under or over paid. There are people at the bottom of the civil service getting minimum wage and there are people at the top earning obscene amounts with final salary pensions. And there is everything in between.

So when there is a rise the media scream about huge wages at the top and when it frozen they scream about low wages at the bottom.

Whole sector pay needs levelling out

Who cares if plenty of people can live on less? The woman in question can't. She's a cleaner in a hospital. If they all up and leave what then? They are as important as the consultants in keeping the hospitals running. If the hospitals are filthy then there's the increased risk of infection.

Why should folk be being paid a pittance for cleaning vomit,shit, piss, blood off walls, floors and toilets? Why is it always a race to the bottom?

£297 isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. DS2 is a team leader in Wetherspoon, as well as a Student Nurse. If he worked there full time he'd be paid more than that.

I don't think you can say that anyone is living on a wage of £x when they can only do so whilst claiming ANY benefits. Be that housing benefits, help with nursery fees, working tax credits or anything else. Even child benefits to some extent.
If they NEED or even are receiving any benefits then you cannot argue that they can live on their wage.

I receive benefits, I am not in anyway bashing those that do. But if the majority of people need benefits to live (as I do) then surely wages are not high enough?

Also to take into consideration is that many public sector workers in NHS do shift work.

So they don't always make their quoted salaries as they're dependent on the extra pay for antisocial hours.

My DD is a nurse in London. Normally she works a mix of shifts in a month but one month she had a lot of stuff going on and some annual leave. So although she did her hours she didn't work any weekends and only a few nights so she took home the princely sum of £1000 that month against her more usual £1800 (take home). Her rent in shared flat (with BF) in a very unsmart area (zone 3) is £750 pcm so I don't know how she'd have lived if we didn't help her out.

She's a fully qualified registered nurse, band 5.

Whenever there's a rise in public sector pay it isn't the people at the bottom that get anything. The MPs got 11% rises last time. People like me, at the bottom, living on 13k have had nothing for 12 years.