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?

Such a shame that we can't seem to escape this incessant need to be doing "better" relative to others. That way misery lies.
We would live in much happier, healthier, lower crime communities, if we had much flatter hierarchies. The minimum wage should increase drastically.

@Willow231 nursery worker here and I agree with everything you said.
But I think a lot of people do not appreciate what our job entails and the training and paperwork behind the scenes.
Plus the demands from parents and the responsibility we have for basically peanuts.

And I still think NMW should be set at £10ph especially for us in the south east where the cost of living seems higher than many other places.

Round here a newly qualified teacher earns around 28k and a supermarket worker (if they can actually get full time) is on less than £18k.
Yet you begrudge them getting a small increase. If you actually have worked in a supermarket you should know how pressured and target driven it is.
If it's so easy just go back to it. Most supermarkets are screaming out for staff.
OP you obviously see minimum wage workers as beneath you (bet you'd soon notice if no one does the job) and they clearly don't deserve a wage they can live on.
Actually there soon will be fewer supermarket workers and care assistants as it seems most nurseries won't survive meaning a lot of parents giving up work so it'll be even easier to get a minimum wage job.

Thing is this will not make much difference to many low paid workers. Between loss of UC top ups due to earning more, higher NI, increased energy bills, increased food costs, probably increased childcare costs to cover higher wages there will be no real change. As ever it will be those with access to more money such as a better paid partner that will benefit.

Having done a few, I reckon the easiest min wage job is supermarket checkouts - no heavy lifting and usually allowed to sit down (though can get sore shoulders from the scanning).

But most supermarkets don’t offer full time shifts - they want lots of people on part time contracts for the flexibility. For a full time contract you’d have to be in a warehouse, factory or care job.

Do it for a week one summer and see if you still feel you’ve got a raw deal. And remember you’d be doing that hard, physical work with little sick pay, pension and holidays,

Teachers crack me up. Have any of you ever asked your employer what your on costs are?

The owner of our nursery drives a jag- she won’t struggle to keep afloat, she may struggle to make the same amount of profit across her 4 nurseries- at some point we need to find a balance. If you don’t pay people enough to live on you pay to subsidise with your taxes - it’s been a race to the bottom for a long time. At some point we (society) have to improve things, but that comes at a cost: income tax, ni, inheritance tax, higher wage bills, council tax.

Our owner seems very well off too but I know her husband is in a very well paid job so that will be part of it. It certainly won't be the case for all nursery owners.

So a newly qualified teacher gets £25k+, as well as 13 weeks holiday and over 20% pension contributions from their employer.

Someone on NMW gets £18k and 5 weeks holiday, pension contributions from employer probably 5%. They probably have shifts in the evening and weekends.

I know which I'd prefer. An upper payscale teacher is on £40k+ basic salary.

If minimum wage goes up, all that happens is, those on minimum wage don’t need so much from the government in top up benefits, instead companies pay their staff a wage they can more easily afford to live on

Great for the governments purse, but the employees end up with exactly the same amount per week to live on, not more! While the cost of living rises....
Alternatively, working hours get shaved as in my case last April, still expected to do the same amount of work only less time to do it!

A new probation officer earns £10.50 an hour and has to manage a caseload of dangerous people including sex offenders. I'm all for the NMW going up but public sector practitioner salaries need looking at too. The starting salary hasn't increased in the last 12 years. Nearly all applicants are graduates, or have come from experience in another related field. I work now in a related justice field and we struggle to recruit because we don't pay much more than NMW and the stress, trauma and responsibility we expect people to handle is in no way comparable to a shift in a shop (I've done both).

I’ve been a teacher and done a wide range of minimum wage jobs, I’d go back to the mw jobs before the teaching, it’s much easier.
Many businesses are only just viable for a variety of reasons the main one being the customer doesn’t want to pay the full rate due to cheaper imports, we have been in a bit of a race to the bottom.

There’s the old joke about a farmer who was asked when inspected by the agricultural wages board, who is employed by the farm and what their pay is. He replied there’s a lad on £xxx a week, an apprentice on £xx a week, the old boy gets his board and lodging and the dog is on £x. Well said the inspector you can’t just give someone board and lodging for a full weeks work, I need to meet the old boy. The farmer said you already have it’s me.

Ex teacher here.

I'm pretty sure that you don't resent the minimum wage increase, you just want a fair wage yourself. If you worked out how much teachers actually get paid 'per hour', it would be far, far less than the minimum wage.

It isn’t. It’s hard, gruelling work, it often involves anti social hours (nights, evenings, weekends) no sick pay, no god forbid death in service benefit, no pension, no enhanced maternity pay

Why is this acceptable ?

The differential between high salaries and low salaries is too great.Long term high earners wages need to reduce to pay for lowearners pay to increase

Min wage should bloody go up.
Have you forgotten who got this country through the last 2 years! It was the work force, the supermarkets, the nursery staff etc, all the people on shit wages.
I able to comfortably working at home, safe and snug, earning a good wage I won't forget who kept us going.

As an employee I’m thankful minimum wage is going up. £9.50 an hour gives me £20 extra a week in my pocket equalling an extra grand a year, I work in early years and the private sector is hit hard and can’t compete with council nurseries and their wages. No wonder so many excellent practitioners are leaving private nurseries for council owned ones.

We do the same job but council wages start at £12 an hour!

I regularly daydream of a minimum wage job 9-5! I suspect most on minimum wage dream of this too.

Have you ever wondered how you manage a social life, or even celebrate family events with your wide family, when you don't know till midway through the week beforehand which days you will be working, whetehr you will be asked to start work at 2am or finish work at midnight? And you don't know in advance when you'll get a Saturday off (and a whole weekend is something you can only dream about)? And Public Holidays are just normal working days for you.

For those saying the increase is eaten up in tax and NI increases you are missing the point

If minimum wage goes up this benefits the government two fold, more money coming in from tax and national insurance, less money going out in universal credit

What this means is:

More money to invest in healthcare, education, the civil service etc

Society benefits, rather than amazon or tesco.

Those of you complaining that you are in government paying jobs and you arent being paid enough, you know what will help with that? The government having more money coming in and less money going out. Society benefits from this rather than corporations. So if you are in a public service job why the fuck are you complaining?

People on national minimum wage frequently have to claim benefits to get by. Thats fucking outrageous, you shouldnt work 40 plus hours a week and still not earn enough to live

You see threads on here all the time about how people who need benefits to get by shouldn't have children, shouldn't expect to have nice things, shouldn't want holidays or nights out, and should be looking to get a second (or third) job or a 'better' job.

It's bullshit.

We need supermarket workers, carers, cleaners, drivers, hospitality staff, etc and there is nothing shameful about working in these so-called unskilled jobs. Not everyone is a high flyer, not everyone is able to (or indeed wants to) climb the ladder, and for a lot of people the job they have is a case of better the devil you know so why risk jumping to another. And that should all fine because a full time NMW job should pay enough to live on, should be enough to have children on if you want children, should be enough to provide some treats and luxuries, should be enough for them to have time off each week so that they're not working all hours with no rest just to stay above water - an honest wage for an honest day's work that provides an honest standard of living. No one should be working 40hrs a week (or more) and still find themselves in poverty.

Finding this thread very interesting. Have always thought care home workers are massively underpaid for what they do in comparison to what the elderly have to pay to stay there, obviously someone at the top is benefitting and it's not the people doing the exhausting personal care, working long hours, cleaning up bodily fluids etc. To the OP- join the life after teaching Facebook group, there's lots of ideas on there if you want to leave teaching or are wondering about options in the future.

This is hilarious. Working in retail is just so easy, isn’t it?

Even as a customer advisor, on full time hours a lot more would be expected of you than to simply clock in, do the bare minimum, and clock out. I swear people have completely lost the grasp of how much work it actually takes to run a shop.

It isn’t just serving customers at tills and “shelf stacking”. It’s constantly-

• date checking every item in store. For the fresh department, this is every single day. Reducing items to clear on a schedule across all ambient, frozen and fresh lines
• preparing for deliveries, packing out stock, merchandising stock, facing off the shop constantly
• health and safety protocols and records (temperatures of all fridges/freezers taken multiple times a day, floor checks to list a few)
• cash handling and ensuring till losses are kept to a minimum
• handling deliveries of higher value items (cigarettes especially)
• ensuring stock loss is kept to a minimum
• numerous KPIs and budget targets set by head office which change all the time and need to be exceeded unless you want upper management in your shop every week giving you a hard time
• preparing for the future. Christmas stock arrives into stores in August. Easter stock will arrive in January. It doesn’t just magically appear a week before the holidays.

And if you have any sort of management responsibility, then you’ll have paperwork to complete daily, orders to do for the shop, gap checks to complete daily (and yes, you have to investigate every single gap in store), checking cameras for stock loss prevention purposes, invoicing, promotion ordering and preparation, CEO visits to prepare for where everything has to be absolutely perfect, dealings with every single head office department (eg HR, payroll, finance etc), recruiting staff, training staff, ensuring wastage of OOD goods has been recorded properly, stocktake where every single item in store has to be counted and recorded, the list goes on.

People absolutely love to act like working in a shop is a doss. It might be for some who won’t last very long, but for most of us, it’s hard work with just as many pressures and deadlines as other jobs. Oh, and you also have to deal with the general public (remember toilet roll gate) and working unsocialable hours. 6am starts? Working until 12pm? How about an overnight shift?

Grow up.

You’ll wave goodbye to the massive employers pension contributions and the 13 weeks holiday. You’ll also be paid less and have sod all job security. Maybe don’t be silly

A few points to mention ...
I have done a couple of minimum wage jobs, as have people I know, and they are easy compared to a lot of professional jobs.

Jobs should be paid by how hard they are, how much responsibilty there is, and also how much training and education is needed.

If there were no job hierarchy, I think far fewer people would bother going into professional jobs. Why stress yourself out and be drowning in responsibility if you are not getting paid well (comparatively) for it?

If someone is doing a job that requires significant education and training (eg. A degree) plus responsibility, then they should be paid well for it.

This is not to say that I disagree with a minimum wage rise in itself, but other professionals should receive an equivalent pay rise.

The early years sector is in crisis. The government will not invest in early years and funded places are bankrupting providers especially in poorer areas where more 2 year olds are funded Schools are getting financial support for Covid recovery, early years settings are not.
I'm a senior practitioner, a graduate studying for a Masters and with SEND qualifications. I earn £9.31/hour, work 42 hours a week and can't afford to turn the heating on. I am single but have my teenage DD half the week. So no maintenance or UC. My finances are on a knife edge. When I see people complaining about high staff turnover in their nursery this is why. Promising young practitioners can earn more cleaning.