..to think that £6.15 an hour...

[BertrandRussell]

.....really is shit wages?

Does it matter what work it is?

Yes minimum wage = minimum skills.

Secondly the job only pays that much because someone is willing to work for that. If no one applied they would have to raise the pay until they got takers.

Yes minimum wage = minimum skills.

Nursery worker? Carer? Might be minimum academic skills but extremely important skills

“Yes minimum wage = minimum skills”
But somehow that changes between 17 and 18? Or between 20 and 21?

Could you live on that?

People do

Students don't pay council tax. That would save about £2000/annum even on band A in most councils. Students get discounted travel costs and discounted rates on many things including banking accounts. Students also get into debt to live. Students' parents are still expected to sub them well into their 20s.

£240 a week if you are paying for a rented room in a house is enough to live on

Really where? I'm still waiting to hear where this low cost nirvana with jobs, cheap rooms and cheap transport is?

There are people who will be poorer than this person in Britain

So wages are fine so long as someone else is in worse poverty?

How do you justify a 25yr old being paid more for the same job when two candidates have no relevant experience? Or where experience is such a minimal part of the job that the 18-20yr old soon out performs the 25 yr old?

Students also get into debt to live. Students' parents are still expected to sub them well into their 20s.

Yes exactly - they survive building up large debts and that is with parental help. Bigger debts if they have no parents and are eligible to borrow even more.

Part time work is not always available to supplement.

I have a degree in my field, am 40 years old and have a tonne of responsibility and experience and get minimum wage.

@C8H10N4O2 I am not justifying. I want everyone to be well paid. But yes I have paid rent and lived on less than the equivalent of £240 a week. I also posted earlier about average room rents in different parts of the country.

You're kind of stuck with the rents of your area. The knowledge that rents in a part of the country 100s of miles from me were cheaper didn't help me to afford to move out of my childhood home.

I'm going to repeat this because it seems posters are deliberately ignoring this - STUDENTS MANAGE!

DS2 got less than £4K to live on per year. Therefore he worked 37 hours on a ward, did his uni work and worked in a pub. His girlfriend got £80 a month because she lived at home, so she worked in a High St chain store.

Plenty of students don't bloody manage despite their parents helping them out so they have to work in these NMW jobs alongside their courses.

If your family can't support you, you take cheap single rooms. I did it. I know these are rooms nice middle class mums would not let their adult children live in, but yes it is possible.
No no one should have to do that, but there is nothing new about this.
It annoys me that a lot of middle class people don't even seem to notice these things until it affects their families.

Most students get loans don't they?

'Yes minimum wage = minimum skills'

Absolutely not true. Child care workers, carers, I could go on, all work for shit money and have lots of skills. To dismiss these jobs as only deserving of minimum wage because they are often done by 'uneducated' people is typical of some of the people on MN.

Imagine life without the Minimum wage.
how did people manage then?

@jennymanara

That single room was £400-500 (10 years ago so maybe more now)

Yes minimum wage = minimum skills.

The point is that an 18 year old and a 25 year old are paid different amounts of money for doing EXACTLY THE SAME JOB.

How is that fair? Age should have nothing to do with what you're paid. If you're, say, a sales assistant in Tesco, you should earn the same whether you're 16, 25 or 52.

@SnuggyBuggy I am looking at the cost of single rooms presently in areas I rented in the past. I struggled to find rooms I could afford at the time. And I lived in areas which have now been gentrified, but which middle class people would not have ventured near in the past.

Well bully for you. I looked for options in my area where I was working at the time and that was what I found. To be fair it was a limited market as it was mostly families and older people and not young people looking to share a house.

Yes it is easier where there are a lot of people renting rooms. The cheapest rooms tend to be lodgers, not houseshares.

'Yes minimum wage = minimum skills'

Lovely. I work as a carer and a person could die if I fuck up the medication I give them. I’ve also worked in childcare and again, multiple children’s lives are my responsibility, if I took my eye off the ball for a few seconds they could badly hurt themselves.
I think my jobs are more important than people sitting at a computer all day, punching numbers.
But what do I know 🙄

You don't get many of those either. They were also always building luxury flats for London commuters and I used to think "but what about properties for the poorer people?"

One of the hospitals I used to work at even struggles to get nurses. It's an area with London prices but your average South East lifestyle.

People don't value staff who work with children or elderly and disabled people. To do it well it is a skilled job. But so many still think it is wiping noses and bums.

The student maintenance loan / expected parental contribution is £9k a year. There are universities in every expensive town and city. Apart from council tax (good point - but that isn't going to cost an individual £2k a year - that amount would be shared), it is enough for most.

Seriously check the HE topics here. No parent is wringing their hands saying how are they meant to live on £9k a year. Most are happy to say they'll be giving their student offspring far less!

@WellTidy i knew people on 98p/hr pre NMW.

NMW is too low, but people seem to have forgotten already just how bad some wages were prior to its introduction.