So if the Minimum Wage increases...

[missbunnyrabbit]

My own wage in a public sector job seems lower than ever. The article I read suggests the public sector pay freezes will end, but I doubt we'll get such a large pay rise!

Aibu to feel like packing my teacher job in to go and work a minimum wage job instead?

Just to make it clear, I dont begrudge minimum wage workers getting a payrise and agree the issue is the top end of the pay structure not the bottom.

I do think the care sector should either be better regulated or government run (albeit well run as a opposed to many other government agencies). Whilst there is profit in it and a questionable funding model, its never going to be a sector where people are paid fairly, have chances of progression and structured training that's consistent across the board- and it absolutely should.

I'd extend this to unpaid carers too, who should absolutely receive more monetary support and access to actual support.

Caring as a whole is massively devalued, both monetarily wise and by society, but I don't think this will make much difference at all. Childcare is too, no one will ever really change that as they'll get the howls of well I don't have kids why should I pay etc.

@Stompythedinosaur

You aren't worse off because someone else has a pay rise.

Don't get sacked into thinking other workers are the issue.

Actually you are if prices go up. If you lived through the 70s you would be well aware that inflation and interest rates meant that many of us ended the 70s earning alot more than we did at the beginning but were no better off or were even worse off.

The issue is that you have a worker earning min wage and a supervisor earning min wage plus 50p. So as soon as min wage goes up by 50p the supervisor says “well I’m not doing the extra work of being a supervisor if I’m on the same wage as the worker underneath me who doesn’t have that responsibility”. So then the supervisor has to receive a 50p wage increase too. Apply that throughout the company pay structure and there are a lot of people needing pay increases, not just the staff on min wage.

@Moaningturtle

Care worker here, I’d like to outline my daily conditions and work benefits. It would be AMAZING if more people could jack in their teaching/public sector/small business jobs and come join us in an industry that is rapidly loosing staff due to brexit and forced vaccination.

21:10 - arrive at work to start getting handover for the 30 clients we have, 18-64 year olds with severe physical and learning disabilities. Make detailed notes about their current wellbeing and any plans in place regarding medication, specialist equipment and therapies.

21:30 - start getting paid a few pence above NMW

21:30- 01:00am - with one other colleague (only 2 people on nights) put to bed 30 fully grown men and women, all of whom have continence needs (wee and poo cleaning up). None of our clients are mobile, we have to use hoists and our own backs to safely lift people up to 25stone into bed. Apply creams and use special equipment to prevent pressure areas. All while being buzzed all over the building to do small tasks like fetch drinks, turn tv channels, someone needs a wee etc etc

01:00- 6:00 - clean entire building, mop floors, disinfect all contact areas, deal with clinical waste, do laundry for all clients. All while answering buzzers for use of wee bottles, changing incontinence pads, someone’s been sick, some one needs an ambulance or OOH dr etc etc.

06:00 - start getting people up and showered, make breakfast and feed/observe them eating if they are choking risk. Do medications (carefully, I could actually kill someone)

07:30 - stop getting paid, but can’t go home as there’s not enough day staff to relieve us.

08:15 - probably get to go home by now.

(Currently you will be expected to work the whole shift in full PPE)

Benefits -

Sick pay after a year, maximum of 2 weeks then on SSP.

Peoples pension

Cycle to work (beware, a colleague was so tired after her shift she was knocked off her bike and the sick pay wouldn’t cover the recovery time. She is no longer physically able to work in care)

28 days annual leave plus bank holidays.

Ongoing mandatory training (this probably won’t be paid but might look good on your CV)

Full time hours will net you approx £1150 pcm.

It varies alot. I work in a care home where everyone is in bed settled by 11pm. Staff are then on call but most nights sleep through till 6 am. If someone is ill you can end up having a waking night but not the norm at all. We all have paid time for mandatory training and any training is paid for.

Just to add we get paid NMW or NLW whatever they want to call it for the sleep hours.

Years of study by social scientists and economists have shown that when the pay differentials between the top ones (CEOs etc) and the bottom ones (people on NMW and other low paid jobs) is smaller, overall happiness is higher. That is the Scandinavian countries, i think (not sure if they have changed)

And it is quite hilarious reading people on this thread basically wanting to protect pay differentials (pp's story about the dry cleaner's made me cringe - that was absolutely an exploitative business) which is what Unions bang on about all the time. I wonder how many of you are in a union? (and it doesn't matter if your company doesn't recognise your union, your industry would probably benefit from collective bargaining elsewhere anyway, and you certainly can use them for help whenever you need it)

OPs taken a bit of a bashing, but given the tone of their posts, that was to be expected. I think the biggest misunderstanding about low-pay and NMW jobs is that it can't be extrapolated over a year, because the hours fluctuate and there aren't that many of them that are 40 hours a week regularly enough to do that.

There are no easy answers here.

@Marelle

The issue is that you have a worker earning min wage and a supervisor earning min wage plus 50p. So as soon as min wage goes up by 50p the supervisor says “well I’m not doing the extra work of being a supervisor if I’m on the same wage as the worker underneath me who doesn’t have that responsibility”. So then the supervisor has to receive a 50p wage increase too. Apply that throughout the company pay structure and there are a lot of people needing pay increases, not just the staff on min wage.

The supervisor should have been paid more in the first place. If the company can’t run a viable pay structure then it’s not a viable company. They should look at where else to cut costs rather than staff salaries. By doing things such as - negotiate better rents, cheaper and more sustainable energy, look at external contracts etc. You’d be surprised how much wastage big businesses have, they could pay staff appropriately and not have to increase the price to the consumer.

I have had insight via a close family member who worked at the very top of a now defunct big business (one that looted the staffs pensions…say no more) and the company was run appallingly, lots of big contracts going to friends - all the profits being used to make the top of the chain richer and the workers suffered.
I bet many work places (big retail especially) are run in a similar manner.

OK. So take a small preschool nursery.

Great provision, wonderful staff, loved by families.

84% of costs are staff costs.

95% of income comes from funded hours paid by the council.

The council funding is not going up.

The wage bill for all staff will have to go up. Unqualified staff on minimum wage. Qualified staff and team leaders to maintain the differential.

So a 6.6% rise in wage bill roughly.

And a 0% increase in income.

How are they supposed to survive?

@ancientgran yes, elderly care is a lot less hands on. But we are dealing with adults who want fully active lives involving going out late, drinking, watching Netflix until 3am like the rest of us! Not content to be tucked up and fast asleep by 11pm, our jobs would be much easier!!.

There are plenty of care homes for 18-64 year olds and people seem to forget about that and assume it’s all old people. Also 18-64 yr olds are fully funded by the local authorities, so the profit is minimal. Hence no extra money to pay for training.

It’s great that you get better conditions, let’s hope it has a knock on effect 💕

Working in a shop is stressful but when you go home you forget it. No waking up in the middle of the night stressing about whether you said the right thing to Little Johnnie's parent or how you're going to cope with your awkward Y9 Maths class tomorrow, etc. I can completely see why you might take a pay cut to do a less stressful job and people do it all the time. Plus the fact you don't have to work in a supermarket - there are nice retail jobs like working in a bookshop or a nice clothes chain like Fat Face.

As for people whinging about affording pay rises - if you need to exploit your staff to make a profit, your business isn't viable. It's that simple.

Before I became a teacher, I had a corporate career. Part of my role involved monitoring the gross margin throughout the year. There was a target % that had to be met. No question. Any cost rises from currency movements, transport increases etc. were passed on to the customer. This was generally non-negotiable. The company was privately owned. The chairman took a personal payment of several million a year. He would not accept anything less.
This is why prices will rise with the nmw. Because those at the top will refuse to reduce the profit they make.

I earn £40k in teaching. I think that's fine. But I think there should be contraction either side of my position in the hierarchy; those at the top should be paid less and those at the bottom should be paid more. I think people struggle to fully comprehend just how much money is paid to those at the very top.

[quote Moaningturtle]@ancientgran yes, elderly care is a lot less hands on. But we are dealing with adults who want fully active lives involving going out late, drinking, watching Netflix until 3am like the rest of us! Not content to be tucked up and fast asleep by 11pm, our jobs would be much easier!!.

There are plenty of care homes for 18-64 year olds and people seem to forget about that and assume it’s all old people. Also 18-64 yr olds are fully funded by the local authorities, so the profit is minimal. Hence no extra money to pay for training.

It’s great that you get better conditions, let’s hope it has a knock on effect 💕[/quote]
Also, the added health complexities of those with conditions such as severe cerebral palsy or spina bifida or MND means it’s much more medical than elderly care. Much more like proper nursing actually, but we still get paid NMW and it’s assumed that we have a low responsibility job.

Hopefully someone who's been to uni will get a job with prospects and progression, probably earning far nore than NMW after a few years and likely to have a good pension with tax free lump sum on retirement
You obviously don’t understand what’s been happening in teaching, especially FE and HE. In my FE college the pay scale was completely removed a few years ago. We were re-categorised as Teacher A (£23k) and Teacher B (department heads etc with extra responsibility, £25k). The only progression available was from Teacher A to Teacher B. So you start as Teacher A and your salary remains the same forever, someone with ten years experience earns the same as someone who started last week. If you get promoted to Teacher B you earn slightly more but that’s the most progression you can ever achieve.

If you work out the salary for Teacher A, 60 hours a week for 39 weeks means you get paid less than £10 an hour. That’s before you add on hours worked during the holidays. They also reclassified us as self employed so they didn’t have to pay sick pay or maternity or pension. There has been a huge amount of unsuccessful opposition from the unions, but basically there was no way round it because the government had cut FE funding by 20% and the only place they could save that money was on salaries. Unsurprisingly there has been a huge exodus of FE teachers. The HE sector is experiencing similar issues.

I earn £40k in teaching. I think that's fine. But I think there should be contraction either side of my position in the hierarchy; those at the top should be paid less and those at the bottom should be paid more. I think people struggle to fully comprehend just how much money is paid to those at the very top totally agree, hence the media spends a lot of time stirring up tensions between those at the bottom end of the pay scale, so they fight amongst themselves oblivious to the amount of money those above get.

@berlinbabylon

Working in a shop is stressful but when you go home you forget it. No waking up in the middle of the night stressing about whether you said the right thing to Little Johnnie's parent or how you're going to cope with your awkward Y9 Maths class tomorrow, etc. I can completely see why you might take a pay cut to do a less stressful job and people do it all the time. Plus the fact you don't have to work in a supermarket - there are nice retail jobs like working in a bookshop or a nice clothes chain like Fat Face.

As for people whinging about affording pay rises - if you need to exploit your staff to make a profit, your business isn't viable. It's that simple.

Not necessarily. Alarms do go off during the night and you have to rock up to the shop in the wee hours to wait for maintenance to come out and fix it, which could take a couple of hours depending on whether the engineer on call is nearby/with someone else/the issue is an easy fix or not. You’ll never see a teacher called into the school at 3am. There are plenty of customer advisors who have key holder duties; it’s not limited to just management.

Similarly, all retail stores have targets to teach and standards to attain. Yes, Fat Face might not be as stressful day to day as a busy, high turnover supermarket, but it’s compensated with the Christmas rush and Boxing Day sales and the like. I would hate to be a clothes fashion worker on Boxing Day because I realise how utterly shit it would be. Missing Boxing Day on its own is a bit crap, but then dealing with queues out the door and people scrapping over a top? No thanks.

Also, as harsh as it is, fashion retail doesn’t have the same level of security that food retail does. It’s highly unlikely Asda will go out of business, but we’ve seen what’s happened with Topshop, Gap etc. It just doesn’t have the same security.

Teachers have security. You can start in a school and stay there until you retire if you wanted unless, on very rare occasions, your school closes down.

A couple of friends that are employers/owners of a production company are looking at 2 ways to cover their increased salary bill;

1. Increae the cost of their product.
2. Lay off 1 or 2 members of staff, and expect the remainder of staff to maintain current output.

But uts obvious, minimum wage increase, cost of living increases

The supervisor should have been paid more in the first place. If the company can’t run a viable pay structure then it’s not a viable company. They should look at where else to cut costs rather than staff salaries.

Supermarkets will raise their prices to account for the increase, the supply chain is already squeezed trying to be the cheapest. Yes there are some managers on £££s, but on the whole there is no leeway in the day to day of it. Of course the ideal would be they take a wage cut but they're not going to, and it wouldn't cover the cost anyway. The cycle continues of people paying more for stuff and struggling to stay afloat.

Hi OP,
I earn 9.80 an hour as a carer. I put that that in the salary calculator and it's about 19k full time.

My husband is a primary school teacher. He's part time but the full time equivalent wage is £37k. He's 10 years in and post threshold (1?) I think.

A teachers wage is not bad (not like the terms and conditions if you are full time which are horrific).

So as a 3 day teacher my husband earns around 22k ish. He works 3 (long) days and a few other hours additionally (maybe 3-6 hours on top). If he wants to leave and go to retail/hospitality or care he'll have to work 5 (or more?) days, unsociable hours and lose his extra holidays. He also might struggle to get fixed contracted hours and be expected to have a lower amount of contracted hours but work whatever he is put on the rota. He might change his job one day but it won't be while we have children in school.

Supermarkets will raise their prices to account for the increase, the supply chain is already squeezed trying to be the cheapest. Yes there are some managers on £££s, but on the whole there is no leeway in the day to day of it. Of course the ideal would be they take a wage cut but they're not going to, and it wouldn't cover the cost anyway. The cycle continues of people paying more for stuff and struggling to stay afloat yes and no- eg. take Sainsburys, they can keep upping the prices, and eventually more and more customers will leave and seek out Aldi etc.

Where are aldi going to magic the extra money from? They pay their staff fairly well, but they have more demands on them. They also don't provide home deliveries etc which are a lifeline to some (that many supermarkets offer at no real benefit to themselves).

Where are aldi going to magic the extra money from? They pay their staff fairly well, but they have more demands on them. They also don't provide home deliveries etc which are a lifeline to some (that many supermarkets offer at no real benefit to themselves) of course aldi prices will go up, but comparatively if they gain more custom from the already more expensive supermarkets they will keep their profits up. Aldi have started click and collect I believe.

@BrilloPaddy

As a small business owner, I'm all ears as to where this 6.6% is going to come from. And how I then deal with my more skilled staff who are also going to want the same increase.

You of course should be paying your staff what they're worth!

@Fetarabbit

I do think the care sector should either be better regulated or government run (albeit well run as a opposed to many other government agencies). Whilst there is profit in it and a questionable funding model, its never going to be a sector where people are paid fairly, have chances of progression and structured training that's consistent across the board- and it absolutely should.

I'd extend this to unpaid carers too, who should absolutely receive more monetary support and access to actual support.

Caring as a whole is massively devalued, both monetarily wise and by society, but I don't think this will make much difference at all. Childcare is too, no one will ever really change that as they'll get the howls of well I don't have kids why should I pay etc.

Oh yes completely forgot about unpaid carers £67.60 and must proved 35 hours care a week.

It’s not about not wanting people to earn a decent living. It’s about making the really stressful jobs that are essential to society (teachers, doctors, social workers etc) more attractive otherwise why would anyone bother? The hours I put in is ridiculous, most weeks I feel like I live to work, I have poor work life balance and the workload is unrealistic. If the pay gap is reduced - where is the incentive for people to continue putting themselves through jobs like this? It’s not about superiority at all that some have suggested - I don’t think I am any more important than anyone else but I need a decent pay otherwise I’m killing my self in my job for nothing. I suspect a lot of people feel this way.