To think that lots of people don't understand just how many jobs pay minimum wage.

[TravellingSpoon]

And how many jobs they would consider worthy of higher wages do not get them.

I am a support worker, and we were talking about this in our staff room this morning. Many of us have had similar experiences, people who cannot believe how little we get paid, or that we would do it for such a small amount of money. And we get 19p above the current minimum wage. Similarly with a couple of my colleagues who have backgrounds in nursery.

I used to be a Support Worker, a peripatetic earning 18k for a HA.
For that I was responsible for the safety planning and measures for high risk DV victims. Attend MARAC. See service users every week. Attend case conferences, Court etc. I’d would be expected to know cp legislation and housing legislation, and gather evidence for evictions, property inspections. Creating and delivering groups for the SU’s to run every week. Also expected to provide management of the project for free, like meeting and liaising with the commissioners, filling in complex reports and monitoring spreadsheets, and doing presentations. The level of responsibility held was huge.
It was not only the organisation exploiting staff, it was the funders who kept heaping more demands on organisations to provide more for their meagre funding. And when tenders came up, the charity who went in at the lowest and promising the earth usually got the bid to provide the services. I do think a bright light needs to be shone on this.
When staff started getting calls and work all the way through their annual leave and sick leave they started leaving in droves.

Theres been a recent case in the employment tribunal where a retail worker sued the shop(it was Holland and Barrett I believe) for all the extra time spent closing/opening up that he'd not been paid for and won!

So legally it is considered payable time.

You look for jobs now and there will be a list of 40 odd responsibilities, plus uni degree mandatory and they will be paying minimum or a few pence above.

This thread has made me think about people working the minimum wage. I thank you. With out you I couldn't buy my food/clothes/medicines/petrol etc
Without you my nana wouldn't be looked after in a care home.
Without you I couldn't arrange my bills or argue with call centre staff (sorry).
What I'm trying to say is that people on minimum wage keep this country running and are vastly unappreciated.

CloudsCanlooklikesheep that was a really interesting point you made, i wonder if i can claim for the many many hours that i worked unpaid setting up a classroom or sat with a child because a parent was late in picking them up. I could be worth a small fortune

I believe in equal pay for equal work so I disagree with the minimum wage being so much lower for under 25s.

I agree. I also have issues with the 0 hour contract, it takes away workers financial stability. It's also open to abuse e.g someone my boss disliked got less hours most weeks.

I think @Basketofkittens is getting a bashing here but she is right. Care work is bloody hard, emotionally draining and just arduous. I’ve done it. But it is not a highly skilled role however you break down all the responsibilities involved. It involves skills but not the kind that necessitate high level training.
I think pp’s are seeing her argument as a dismissal of them as people, so are rushing to justify how skilled they are and what they do as a carer. Which still doesn’t change the fact that it is a low skilled job. And having a low skilled job does not reflect badly on the person doing it.

Does the benefits system basically subsidise companies? They pay low wages and the state tops up the wages in the form of benefits?

Inaquequefortheloo ok i going to throw it out there how do you define skill .I think care work defines skill , empathy , caring , able to think on your feet in a really stressful situation .Because carer workers don't have a degree i really don't think it makes us low skilled at all it makes us have different skills to those who have a degree .I take offense at care workers being called low skilled .You and Basketof kittens may well disagree, your right and a google search written by some officious idiot may back you up but i stand by my guns .

The average wage in my city is £20,500. Bearing in mind there's gp's, solicitors etc on decent money, there's a lot earning minimum wage or just over. I'm fortunate to earn nearly double but not enough hours, so I'm struggling.

I work in projects/finance, and there are a mixture of people who are qualified/semi qualified accountants and unqualified people doing the same or similar things. The qualified people are paid more, but interestingly I’ve found a lot of them to be less good at the job.

Some have good knowledge but lack common sense, critical thinking, decision making skills etc and some are just shit all round. Just in my small team alone, our highest performer isn’t qualified and our lowest performer is a fully qualified accountant but terrible.

It just goes to show that determining ‘skill’ by how many elite qualifications you possess doesn’t always work.

It is such a shame that as a society we value the work of the people we need the most the least.

Ok Hearthside. Empathy, caring, thinking on your feet. All skills, none of which involve specialised training or higher education. In theory, the kind of job that anyone could do (note I say in theory- I think many people could not cope with the vicissitudes of such employment).
If you have no qualifications you can work in care. It’s not selective.
It seems you’re taking offence at this correct definition of your profession as you feel it reflects badly on you and how hard you work. Whichever way you cut it, jobs that require no professional qualifications or training are usually low skilled. Like care.
Your ire would be better directed towards the issue that low skilled traditionally female roles such as care/ childcare etc. are always valued less and thus paid less than traditionally male low skilled jobs such as labourers.

@Apileofballyhoo that's exactly what happens.

Companies can get away with not paying the minimum wage because most low paid workers claim things like tax credits which boost their income to acceptable levels.

However with the introduction of universal credit I believe this is becoming less common.

That should say "get away with not paying the living wage".

The minimum wage is significantly too low. And many jobs pay too little.

But it is not simply a case of paying people according to how hard they work or how good they are at their jobs.

The higher paid jobs - mostly those where there has been professional or vocational training - reward not only for the daily effort, but also for the past training/qualifications achieved. That is why it will almost always pay off financially, for those who are able to do so, to obtain professional qualifications.

There is also the economics of supply and demand. If a job is something that very many people could do/would want to do then it does not have to pay very much to fill the post.

YANBU, op. When an Aldi opened locally, my son lost his key worker at nursery. She was an NVQ level 4 nursery nurse with more than a decade experience, but working in the Aldi paid more than caring for our children. Seemed like madness to me!

Inaquequefortheloo i asked you how to define skill as it is your words not selective but instead you keep saying what you have read defines skill .Tequilasunrises you have nailed it , spot on.Inaquequefortheloo i think it is a fruitless waste of my day off as you think you are right i don't so this will go round and round and and well there you go .

You beat me to it Hearthside.

ok i going to throw it out there how do you define skill .I think care work defines skill , empathy , caring , able to think on your feet in a really stressful situation .Because carer workers don't have a degree i really don't think it makes us low skilled at all it makes us have different skills to those who have a degree .I take offense at care workers being called low skilled

There are many different skills for each job. Just because they are different from yours doesn't mean they aren't skills. I would take several of the care worker I worked with over the years over some of the 'qualified nurses' I worked with who didn't actually know basic care or how to engage our residents in everyday life or the first thing about dementia any day. Working out why a resident is doing something and working with them not against them is a skill you learn from experience as well as training. Each resident is different. You have to know their history, their working life, their abilities, to make their life as good as it can be. Dignity and respect, giving them choices when it matters, and knowing when it matters are all skills.

Every application form I have seen lately lists good communication, working with people, working as a team, being able to work in stressful situations etc as SKILLS. I don't need a degree or similar to tell me I can do all those.

But hey don't let that stop anyone from looking down their noses at people who never had the chance or didn't want to go to uni to 'prove' how 'skillful' they are.
There is much more to real life than endless qualifications. I have quite a few qualifications in different areas but it doesn't.make me any.better than anyone else. In fact I learned a lot from some of our amazing carers over the years.

Inaquequefortheloo i asked you how to define skill as it is your words not selective but instead you keep saying what you have read defines skill
??? I’m not quite sure what that means. Do you mean as in reading for a qualification?
Tequila’s point isn’t spot on though is it. Relevant as her experience, but if I’m ill I’d rather have someone with the qualifications like a nurse or dr than a care assistant diagnosing and treating me.
Also how do sort out the good people from the bad without qualifications/ some sort of criteria? It’s a meritocratic society in that respect.

I'm not sure that arguing that a nurse is more skilled than a care assistant is the point really. Yes they are, and therefore they are paid more. But in that minimum wage and just above bracket there are jobs that require no training or experience and jobs that require some to a lot of training or experience. Its as others have said the structure has flattened out - there are minimum wage jobs and professional jobs with a big gap between. minimum wage work represent several different levels of qualification, skills are experience. When i got my first job it was in a corner shop. I was 14 and it took 2 hours to show me the till, how to cash up, how to restock shelves and what to clean. I got 2.35 an hour. When i had two years experience i doubled my salary by working in an opticisns. It was more skilled. I had 2 days training. I then doubled my salary again by working in an office. I had a 4 years work experiencd and a years secretarial training by that point. All of those jobs now pay minimum wage.

Okay, my job in retail could be done by a trained chimp. It does NOT require any special skills or training - I am massively overqualified for it, but I do it because the flexibility of a 16 hour contract means that I can do my 'other job' from home, which often requires attendance at events, where I can book myself out in the work diary for days at a time. There aren't many other jobs with that level of flexibility.

For that, I earned £9,5000. NMW plus a few pence, various hours. I'm single and (yes, I checked) not eligible for a penny benefit. Which is why I live in a house with no heating and no hot running water.

Unskilled workers still need to eat and not die of hypothermia...

They do. Unskilled work is valuable work. As a society its odd to look at something unskilled and think they dont deserve a living wage, and then starts to push more and more jobs into that category of minimum wage.

I think @Basketofkittens is getting a bashing here but she is right.
She's not getting a bashing. She's getting some indignant responses because she's using the usual simplistic arguments low-skill, supply and demand that people know are dumbed-down, misleading justifications for abusing the workforce.
Care work is bloody hard... But it is not a highly skilled role
PPs have already pointed out that the soft skills carers need are counted as skills in more prestigious jobs. I would add that despite endless attempts by the sector to get around the problem, carers are often required to know a fair bit about medications and are required to do things like manual bowel evacuation, which will ruin a client's health for good if it's done without the required delicacy. This reality causes no end of problems when funds are being cut and local authorities, clients and agencies are endlessly looking for cheaper and cheaper care workers.

@user149 the amount of abuse you get from customers dont blame retail workers for just doing the bare minimum. When the customers and head office treat you like a piece of shit on your shoe why would you put anymore effort in?