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.

Sadly pay has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with scarcity, of people willing and able to undertake each role.

EU regulations have been a protection and these will soon be removed.

Brexit won't make any immediate difference at all. The laws will still be in place on 1 November after Brexit - they might have been inspired/required by the EU but they were brought into law by the UK Parliament. The UK parliament will need to change UK law IF they wish to reduce/change the current laws - that will require the usual Parliamentary processes, scrutiny etc.

Sadly pay has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with scarcity, of people willing and able to undertake each role.

Indeed - Economics 101 - basic supply and demand theory.

The thing that pisses me off is that some companies are not going to extend the labour budgets.
So managers will be given the same figure to work with but will now have less staff to use.

But they will demand the same level of work and higher results.

It's crippling the workers. But they will continue to get away with it

You can repeat "low-skill" and "supply and demand" and "[insert subject here] 101" until the cows come home; they are dumbed-down, simplistic clichés that sound good to people who want to ignore deliberate distortion of the labour market and justify the abuse of workers.

Those clichés ignore government subsidies to agencies for training (and the abuse of such subsidies); they ignore agressive recruitment from the other side of the world; they ignore the punishments for local jobseekers who don't apply for jobs they know they have no ability or will to perform.

I had never heard of soft skills until i goggled it. Then i googled hard skills to compare. Fuck me when did all this come about.

That’s why doctors are relatively well paid because it’s not a job that can be done by just anyone whilst your job can

You are kidding right? Care work is not a job just anyone can do I can assure you of that. A good care worker is worth their weight in gold to the people they are looking after. Most people have no idea what a care workers job entails (unless you see it first hand from a relatives perspective) as I found out going through applications many times.

I have worked with plenty people who have 'qualifications' yet are shit at their job. And plenty people without a 'qualification* on paper when they started but were bloody brilliant at their job. (And i have met some bloody useless, arrogant and clueless as to how to interact with patients Doctors too)

The ability to work with co-workers and clients alike, willingness to get on with the job no matter how hard or dangerous it gets, the willingness to learn to improve your skills on the job and a whole host of other
skills are far more important sometimes than a 'qualification'.

This attitude to workers on nmw just shows the complete disdain some people have for retail staff; hospitality staff, carers, factory workers etc. Like somehow they are all lumped in this big pot of 'not worth paying more because they didn't go to uni there for have no brains nor skills to do anything better'.

I have plenty qualifications but have spent 2yrs working nmw job as that's the only jobs available where I live. And i worked bloody hard for it. Stop being today feckers.
Skills are not just bits of paper. Skills are real everyday things that mean the difference between a good worker and a bad one.

Goady feckers!

My daughter has a degree in forensic biology, jobs are few and far between. She is working 3 jobs, 2 in the same place and another is zero contract hours, all nmw.

Sadly pay has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with scarcity, of people willing and able to undertake each role.

That isn’t the full picture though. By that logic rubbish collectors, sewage workers etc would be earning more. It’s a mix of many different factors that have driven some pays down and other up.

Willow we know what we are and we are dam good at it.

DP earns twice what I do. He freely admits his job is no more skilled than mine (or more skilled than my job when I was caring for that matter) it’s just in a sector which pays better!

I got paid about the same as you OP for working in the NHS as an assistant audiologist. As it was a rural service I had to work completely on my own at times and always had my own caseload. As well as the basic repairs, I would have to make impressions of patients' ear canals and programme hearing aids. There was no realistic opportunity for promotion. I voted with my feet but I did have a previous career to fall back on.

Inaquequefortheloonope i am not aerated you would know if i was .And where do i insult you i am speaking the truth if you can't accept that then that is not me be insulting it is you refusing to accept your views are insulting.
I have years and years of experience of challenging behaviour i wouldn't have got the job i did without the skills i have .
You are resorting to making out i am insulting because you don't like what i am saying .Have some and chill .

The other thing that used to annoy me when I was in hourly paid jobs is you would start with a company on whatever the min wage was then, over a period of time you would get pay rises for good work/annual increase etc then min wage would be increased so people still on min wage would get a pay rise but you wouldn’t so all the hard work in getting more money was effectively wiped out!

YANBU

It's a catch 22 imo. One the one hand people want to earn the very best they can (which is of course understandable) then on the other hand people want to pay the very least for goods and services that they can get away with. It's impossible to have both.

You either want things cheaper but that means paying staff less or you are willing to pay a bit more and have staff on better wages. Not every company is rolling in millions of profit..

I think I'm probably guilty of not realising how many jobs are NMW or how hard it can be to live off that. I was lucky enough to go into a grad job straight from uni (this was almost 20 years ago) and my salary has gone up steadily from there.

Sadly, I do think it's got less to do with skills (soft or hard) and more to do with how many people are able to apply for and get a particular job. For my role, you need a degree, postgrad qualification and 10+ years experience managing large-scale projects in a technologically fast-changing environment with proven commercial success. Realistically the pool of people with that particular skill set is small and so pay is high.

Caring is a very hard job but unfortunately a lot of people have the basic skills to apply for it. I can see care assistant roles in my former city requiring only 6 months' experience in any care setting, no qualifications. So of course there will be many applying (especially with the JSA situation) and so pay is low.

I would recommend to any young people at school to study hard, get some decent qualifications and get into a career if they can. There are too many people chasing low-paid jobs already.

I think that when talking of care jobs, as well as knowledge, skills, and experience it is personal qualities which is the most important thing, this is what makes a good carer and some people can have multiple degrees but would not make a good carer.

I am a civil servant. You know the ones, high wages, final salary pension and nothing to do? I am not the lowest grade and I earn £2 over the minimum wage - after 15 years in the job. The lowest grade earns marginally above minimum wage (think pence an hour). Combine that with 10 years of 1% increases and I am technically worse off than I was when I started working here. I am too old to get another job so I am stuck here until I retire. And I don't have a final salary pension!!

The thing is the terms used such as low and soft skills don't reflect what's actually required to do the job well and there's no distinction between the two in these sectors. Care work can be low skilled - to do it well though you need to be anything other than low skilled, the problem is regulation or lack of. The posters who've posted here about their skills and qualifications in care have those skills and qualifications because they've applied and done them themselves to improve their knowledge and skills, and therefore improve their care. Yet they command the same wage as Dolly Daydream who can't be arsed and is only there because the job centre forced them to be.
Another issue is professional standards being expected of workers that are neither paid nor regarded as professional. It seems ok to expect robot like perfect service, with never a mistake like humans make from time to time, massive product and allergy knowledge, an ability to mind read and know what each persons (who you meet for about a minute) expectations are, yet still regard them as lower than a 'professional' and treat them accordingly. Which is it? Do you expect 'professional' service and therefore should expect to pay for it, so the person can be trained to that standard and their wages reflect that, or do you accept that a minimum wage worker is neither paid nor regarded as professional so that standard should not be expected. You can't have it both ways - but we seem to be in that place now.
Care staff (and all frontline staff) usually take the hit for anything that goes wrong. A story hits the headlines about abuse in a care setting. And anyone with any experience in that area can usually read between the lines and understand what actually happened. While there are care workers that abuse etc, I would say 75% of these stories come about because of failure further up - yet the care staff are the ones held accountable and to blame. They are dismissed as being low skilled and therefore not knowing what they're talking about, and the 'skilled' managers further up issue a statement about lessons learned and suspension, sacking and training and everyone goes "Yeah! They've sorted it!" Without looking any deeper.

Going back only 5 years I worked for an Independent Financial Advisers -dealing with wealthy clientele- they paid graduates between 14-16k and treated their staff like shit. Utter shit.

I left. I now myself recruit graduates and pay them around 55k. And it is hard to find the graduates with the skills! Even at that salary. And the ones who do have the skills want more. I've received CVs from people requesting 10k a month.

The situation is absurd and untenable. What gets my goat is the fact that people are working themselves silly for shit money and employers (for instance my old company) would justify it. It's abysmal. Instead of employing fewer people and paying good money, they take on double the employees and pay shit. It's disgusting.

@missbattenburg Fri 04-Oct-19 16:24:23

MuddlingMackem said:
Management experience for your CV in some cases I would think.

This is a cop out (imo). Companies peddling the line that they shouldn't have to pay someone fairly to do a more senior role because that person is gaining experience is tosh unless part of a specific training/development plan with goals, an end date and something tangible for the employee (qualifications, for e.g.).

I didn't mean I thought it was justifiable by the employer, I meant that's one reason I could think of why the employee would think it worthwhile despite the paltry pay increase. I don't think it's acceptable either.

Someone having a different opinion to you doesn’t make them a goady fucker. Some people have a chip on their shoulder because they earn minimum wage and don’t have a degree. Don’t blame others for that

I work in a nursing home, specialist nursing care. We get £8.21p/h. Lead carers are on 50p more.

As a family member of someone close being cared for in a nursing home, I think it's taking the piss really that carers are looking after society's most vulnerable for such shit wages.

Luckily, all the people I work with love their job. I love my job. You have to love care work to be able to do it because we certainly don't do it for the money.