To think there is little incentive to work hard in the UK

[BeachTree]

Context. 30's, no kids, single, work full time.

Just a bit disheartened. I have never claimed benefits, or any type of support, I work hard to make sure I can support myself (Not disputing those who genuinely require benefits/support) I have always paid all my taxes, and national insurance. I expect by the time I reach retirement age, the 'state pension' may look very different to what it does now and may not be available despite having paid in my whole life.

I feel sometimes that I pay so much into the 'system' and get very little return and don't 'take' from it, whereas there are many people claiming every benefit possible, and constantly 'taking' from the system they don't pay into. There are so many ways to extract money from the system but only for those who don't work full time. I know someone who worked for about 1 or 2 year in late teens in the UK, then worked abroad for a number of years, during this time did not keep up with national insurance payments and obviously not paying UK tax as no in the country, also didn't pay tax in the country they resided in. Returned to England to have a baby on the NHS, now residing back in England, claiming benefits as a single parent for 2+ years, gets assistance with rent council tax etc despite having paid next to nothing in to the system. I cannot compute how this is fair.

For example the cost of living payment, people who claim benefits will get £650, where as those who work and do not claim benefits will get £400. The cost of living crisis affects all of us - perhaps more so the people who work their socks off and aren't 'entitled' to 'support' The system is backwards and not in favour of people who work full time to support our ridiculous benefit system. So many examples - ie. people get help with rent, council tax, working tax credits etc etc etc - however those who work get zero, zilch.

AIBU?

Literally this I have never claimed or plan to work hard in my life, nor do most people if we are comparing ourselves to even our grandparents.
I earn well because i worked out early on how to maximise reward vs effort

Maybe something should be done where the people that pay most tax in a year are honoured in a glitzy awards ceremony.

😂
A flogging for everyone else.

You’re angry at the wrong people.

As someone who has to pay for prescriptions- even though I’m on a lower salary- quite frankly it pisses me off that people on benefits get them for free when they’re already receiving free money (and no, I am not including disabled people or single parents here before anyone comes for me!)

But not everyone on benefits gets free prescriptions.

This is the eligibility criteria:

"You qualify if, on the date you claim help with health costs:
you receive Universal Credit and either had no earnings or had net earnings of £435 or less in your last Universal Credit assessment period
or
you receive Universal Credit, which includes an element for a child, or you (or your partner) had limited capability for work (LCW) or limited capability for work and work-related activity (LCWRA), and you either had no earnings or net earnings of £935 or less in your last Universal Credit assessment period"

If you resent someone earning less than £500 a month getting free prescriptions, idk what to say tbh

Who?

If you want to start work at 7.30 and finish around 7pm, but only be paid for 8 hours, come in at weekends or wfh all weekend, eat dinner at your desk, divide nearly every day of your life into 6 minute units which you have to meticulously log so that you are deemed to be profitable enough not to sack every following a review every 3 months, deal with high value, high risk deals where if you make even a slight mistake, the whole deal is lost and so is your career, compare difficult to understand legal principles, research obscure, often foreign case law, deal with colleagues who are competitive not supportive, difficult, shouty senior partners, do 7 years of university and training, then feel free to take over my 75k pa job.

DH does complicated algorithms from scratch. Fancy that, do you? Must be dead easy. A bit like being a hairdresser or a checkout assistant, what with the calculation of all those amounts.

I've done other jobs while supporting myself through university, none even approached being a lawyer for stress, difficulty and effort.

Alternatively, if you feel like paying me 75k to do something a bit nicer, maybe like a bit of gardening, or being a mystery buyer or diner, feel free to employ me. I'll be demanding that salary from you though, since according to you its no less hard work.

I'm sure some doctors, builders, engineers and dentists would feel the same as me.

Cheers!

I pay for mine - I don't resent them being free for people on benefits - fully support that.

I do resent them being free for people who are far, far wealthier than I am - e.g. everyone gets them free in Wales and Scotland, you get them free if you're pregnant even if you're a millionaire, etc. Let's make them either free for everyone no matter where you live, or properly means-tested so they are free for those in genuine need but people who can afford them, pay for them.

😂☝👌

I don't have time for dinners, lunches, or chatting.

Presumably you don't have time to waste on MN either then?

Well of course there are jobs where hard work = more pay. But that isn't always true.

For example, I used to be a support worker. One of my colleagues transferred to admin which came with a pay rise. Even she said the admin work was far far easier. So the support workers (by her own admission) worked harder, yet got paid less.

Lots, I'm off for 6-8 weeks after surgery.
👌🤓

Not everyone on benefits gets free prescriptions or free school meals.
I'm a single parent, went back to work as soon as my paid maternity leave ended and have always worked, currently work full time for the local council and get some universal credit.
I've never been entitled to either of those things and I can't afford to do a degree either as someone up thread was moaning about; it's all changed with universal credit, loans are counted as income so it's near impossible for a single parent to go to university unless they are having housing and childcare heavily supported or subsidised by family.
If a life reliant on the state looks so easy and appealing why not quit your jobs and leave your husband's and join all of us lazy scroungers in the bed of roses?

God, the hard work thing.

Why do people who work hard and are earning a lot seem to think that realising/understanding/admitting that some other people who also work hard but don't get paid a lot, somehow takes away from their hard work?

It doesn't, all it means is that society values some hard work more than other hard work, and in some cases that's completely and utterly fucked up.
People who care for our children, our elderly and vulnerable relatives are among some of the lowest paid in society, but arguably some of the most important jobs to be done well.
We don't require much in the way of checks around the type of person to do this, we don't require much in the way of education and training to ensure these jobs are done well.
As a society we expect these services, demand them, but devalue the people doing them, and woe betide that someone says they work hard in one of those jobs, because someone who also works hard but earns 4 times as much will be along to slap you down all offended at the notion.
Honestly, it's ridiculous.

Oh get over yourself @AchatAVendre !

I am sure everyone thinks you're very clever and hardworking, but also everyone with half an ounce of understanding knows that plenty of people work very hard and receive a fraction of your pay.

You’ve described a lot of trades there.
life and death if they fuck up.
lots of training.
long hours, billing for hours worked.

be lucky if they get 75k.

it’s not a race to the bottom what’s valued, people have different skills.

@AchatAVendre
Quite a few people also earn 75k and don't particularly hard at all - maybe find one of those jobs if you're finding yours too stressful.. no one is forcing you to stay in the job. Or find one with a better work life balance (but potentially less pay)

You do realise that the largest recipient of benefits are pensioners, followed by people in employment? This benefits bashing post reflects badly on you.

Here, here!

I know working as a solicitor can be exactly as @AchatAVendre describes - I used to work as a solicitor in a City law firm, where starting salaries of newly qualified solicitors can now be as high as £125,000 with big pay hikes every year. It was highly stressful, many colleagues drank heavily and complained incessantly about the work which was not emotionally rewarding in any way, because it all revolved around money at the end of the day, not principles or people, or causes I might feel were important enough to justify the blood, sweat and tears. Of course, I could have earned a fraction of the amount doing legal aid work, or a different type of private practice work that held more meaning for me, but it did strike me that to do a good job as a solicitor always required a lot of work and stress regardless (although it would be possible to fine tune the amounts, depending on practice area), and not always work that made you feel good about yourself, and I could see no reason whatsoever to stay where I was in the City other than greed - certainly not job satisfaction or pleasure. So I left, as the only reason I had for staying where I was was the money, and what a shit thing to have to reflect on at the end of your life, if you have spent a whole career working with competitive, heavy drinking people you mostly don’t like much, just for the money.

I think the problem really is, pay does not reflect effort well at all; nor does it reflect value to society. Pay reflects proximity to money and the ability to generate more money, and this doesn’t have to be for good causes - it could be, and frequently is, pushing things colossally harmful to humanity. In fact, if your role is too vital, a cap has to be put on your ability to profit from it, or you may be denied the chance to profit at all, because society needs you too much. We wrap a lot of this up in the claim that some roles don’t require particularly valuable or unusual skills, but the truth is, that’s just so we can find enough people to do the work, lumping the atrocious in with the brilliant and paying them all the same crap for very different qualities of output. This is also why increasingly extreme disparities in wealth between the richest and almost everyone else are obscene, because they are not merited in any meaningful way, and indicate that money generation has ceased to benefit society, instead just benefiting a greedy few. Yet so many people react to this by kicking out at those closest to them and arguing for changes that effectively widen the gap between the elite and the rest still further, and thus in the long term, push the majority ever closer together, making it less and less financially worth making extra effort.

You do realise that the largest recipient of benefits are pensioners, followed by people in employment? This benefits bashing post reflects badly on you.

I think many on this thread include top up payments being an incentive to do less paid work too.

If it is available of course people will use the option of top-ups.

It encourages people who've never considered working to get a paying job which in turn improves the lifestyle and MH of the claimants and enables single parents to have a work life balance.
.
Without top-ups people would starve and crime would increase.

I personally believe the benefits system is here to help people in genuine time of hardship - for some this may be long term, others shorter. I don't think anyone has any issues with this.

What I do have a problem with is people using the benefits system as a career and a way out of working to support themselves ever. My 21 year old DD went to school with a girl who was one of 7 children by parents who never worked. Come secondary school stage, the children barely even went to school and left with no GCSES. A few of these children are now pregnant and/or have had children and the whole cycle begins again.

I blame the government for allowing this type of thing to happen - this is what needs to change.

The government has changed all this my cousin got pregnant at 17 with her daughter S. S is very pretty but hasn’t got two brain cells to run together. So naturally she had her first at 19.
but it’s all changed now hasn’t it there’s no decorating grants after you’ve been allocated council flat. There’s no £500 to buy you a new pram no healthy start vouchers to pay for the fruit and vegetables.
it’s all come as a bit of a shock

See I have thought about jacking it all in and living on benefits. At the moment, I'm a single parent working 40 hours a week. I get paid a pretty good salary. I get a decent amount of maintenance from the Ex-husband. But despite that, I get no help with anything else. I'm stressed all the time, juggling full time work with household tasks, kids activities, etc. I'm knackered, my lifestyle is unhealthy because of it, I can't afford to cut my hours (even if there were any part time roles in my industry).
Yet I have to have a very basic holiday (camping usually) and I strongly suspect I'll be working until I drop dead.
Really the only reason I'm still working is because I've no idea what sort of housing I'd end up with on benefits.

It's not so much about 'working hard', it's more commonly about risks and stress. Risks to others, risks for the company and other employees. It's about making decisions that have significant impact on others.

It's about the stress that results from the above. Stress that comes with responsibilities. Managing staff is stressful. It involves a level of mental demands that you don't have when you have no direct management duties. It takes a small mistake to have sure consequences.

Yes, a carer who makes a mistake might get sack, but so does their manager who has responsibility for that staff, so if they manage 20 staff, that's 20 chances of potentially losing their job.

I used to operate at two level higher. The level of responsibility was too much for me. I downgraded. The job and tasks are not that different, but I don't deal with corporate politics any longer, only manage 3 staff, and if something goes wrong, I can just escalate. My job is much easier. It is rightly reflected in the pay.

Exactly what @Supersimkin2 said.