Aibu to not want a £15 minimum wage?

[Israisingwagesworthit]

This morning I saw a post saying there are calls for a £15 per hour minimum wage.

I understand fully that the current minimum wage doesn't give people enough to survive on and something needs to change to ensure everyone gets a comfortable living wage, and I support this.

However by pushing up the minimum wage doesn't that just add additional costs for businesses, therefore increase costs to consumers removing any benefit of an increased minimum wage in addition to reducing the disposable income and pay gap of anyone above minimum wage.

Surely this only benefits the government with additional income tax?

Is this the best option in a time of potential 18% inflation, would this not increase it further?

Capitalism is the issue, rather than sharing the profit wealth, CEO's (of all levels of business, small and large) keep the profits for themselves and just raise prices when costs go up.

Am i being unreasonable to assume that in order for the £15ph wage to be successful, companies must accept lower profits rather than increasing prices in line with the wage increase otherwise its just pointless and daminging to all wage earners not just the minimum wage.

Won't the government have to threaten windfall taxes to those who increase prices to maintain profits to make it work and to actually benefit minimum wage earners?

I'll admit I'm a middle earner (£40k) civil servant (so no chance of a payrise anytime soon) so would be financially damaged by a raise in minimum wage if nothing is done to stop the subsequently price increases of products after a minimum pay rise. As a result my view may be biased, but am I wrong?

What sort of maths fuckery is that - that Tesco made under £2 million profit. 😂 a day?

Not sure where you are getting £1,693,000 from...I think you may have missed a 0.

www.retail-insight-network.com/news/tesco-results-2021-22/

Quick Google suggests tesco profits were around 2.18bn?

I'm glad someone is paying attention to the point that the problem is the cost of living rather than merely wages..

Think about the consequences of a wage rise in the context of childcare.

If NMW rises then it means more people no longer qualify for free hours. Instead more people have to pay, but not at current prices, but at ones adjusted for the rise in wages. This is at time when nurseries are already struggling with energy costs. They have already complained that they really struggled with managing the last minimum wage rise because they didn't get an increase in funding to reflect the increase in costs.

It resulted in less nurseries offering free hours and some were forced out of business. NOTE: These are some of the small businesses that some people have referred to on this thread as not being viable. Also see care services.

There is no guarantee here that people getting an uplift in wages will be in any way financially better off.

And if there's fewer nurseries about what impact does that have?

Well for starters, in places with less people in full time employment it will be harder to get nursery places as free places as they are already subsidised by those who pay. 'Well if you don't work you don't need childcare' some will say. Except we know that even access to 15 hours can be valuable to parents and children for development reasons, social and mental wellbeing and for safeguarding reasons. Particularly in more deprived areas...

Remember that a minimum wage rise of that much is likely to put up the cost of food. So if you aren't in employment then the cost of living will be MORE not less affordable because there won't be an accompanying uplift in benefit payments.

For unions to be going on about wage rises in isolation, it boils my piss because of the utterly one dimensional thinking on this and the utter lack of context or lateral thinking about whether it actually improves affordability of living.

And thats what you need to think about the cost of living, does wage rises make life more affordable to people who are employed? To people out of work? To people on fixed incomes like state pensions? If the answer is not yes to all of these groups then you are solving precisely fuck all.

How do you ensure that wage rises arent just passed on and profits aren't impacted?

"Cost of living" is distraction talk. Even prior to energy hikes we were already in the situation where millions of full time working employees are claiming benefits. Wages in the lower four deciles have barely risen for fifteen years. That's a generation worth of years. Energy prices have brought it to our attention but it's been going on for a long time.

This isn't a cost of living crisis. It's a wage crisis. We've been printing money and subsidising employers paying poverty wages via benefits for a decade and a half.

You can't run a country like that, long term. As we are finding.

I think that if NMW went up to £15, then companies would attempt to run their businesses on even fewer staff than they already do. Instead of paying 3 staff 10ph, they’d pay 2 staff 15ph. Not caring that the 2 were run ragged.

I mean for large companies, whilst ensuring that small companies with much smaller profit margins - like nurseries and care homes, manage to stay solvent.

Remembering a lot of additional costs are associated with start up - something that large established companies don't have to think of. It will increase the rate of failure for new start ups which is already pretty high.

*I think that if NMW went up to £15, then companies would attempt to run their businesses on even fewer staff than they already do. Instead of paying 3 staff 10ph, they’d pay 2 staff 15ph. Not caring that the 2 were run ragged`8.

companies are already doing this with minimum paid staff as there are no staff to employ , so what difference would it make other than for service places the service would be even worse and people wouldn't return.
The difference would be high wages for the staff run ragged already

look at employment figures and there is mass vacancies

I think if you're on minimum wage and potentially also struggling to make ends meet, then inflation is not your biggest immediate concern. Feeding your family is.

for those stating that wage rises will increase inflation

explain how with wage cuts over the last 10 years in real terms - then why is inflation at 12% the highest for 40 years?

You really think the CEO pay cut could fund £15 min wage for the entire uk work force is beyond unrealistic

then the workers need to stop doing his work and making him money, there is no profit without the workers

look at employment figures and there is mass vacancies

which is what makes this conversation even more odd tbh. More vacancies than workers leads to higher wages. Supply and demand and all that.

@Cyclemarine

I don't think you need to worry about the pay difference between teachers and TAs in the unlikely event of a £15p/h mw. Mainly because schools won't be able to afford it, because like the recent teacher payrise it will fall to schools to fund it from there existing, already stretched, budgets. The situation in most schools is already at breaking point - I am a TA and a governor in my school, so have a pretty good idea of the state of our finances and I know that there is every likelihood that with the unfunded payrises, increase in fuel costs and increase in cost of resources such as books etc, many of our support staff will end up being made redundant next year. Including me. I imagine that the same pattern will be repeated across lower paid jobs throughout the public sector and many of those people will end up on benefits since there simply won't be jobs available if the NMW increases to £15ph. Many of those former employees will end up on benefits , so the economy will not gain as instead of paying a small amount of benefit to enable people to take lower paid jobs, we will be paying out more benefits to those who can't work as their jobs have disappeared.

I am old enough to remember when John Smith was shadow chancellor and put forward what seemed to me, a well thought out plan to improve funding for public services in general. Unlike most politicians, he was honest and stated that in order to fund the services the public claim to want, there would have to be a small rise in tax. Labour lost the election. Unfortunately, it seems we only want these services if somebody else is paying for them. It's all very well saying that companies who can't afford £15ph, don't deserve to exist, but it's not just companies that can't afford it. The public sector can't either.

Cost of living is cost of living, it's not temporary, its always there.

We have propped up wages for a very long time. It isn't working now and it wasn't working before. That is not a distraction, that is the nub of the issue.

The current crisis has thrown it into sharp relief but the fact is the cost of living has out stripped wages for far too long. It can't be solved by simply chucking money around - that's a good portion of the reason why we're in this mess.

Possibly true but the people who do have the time/energy/resources (and who are paid to do the job of running the country to benefit all of its citizens) do know that inflation is making it harder to put food on the table. I wouldn't expect someone on minimum wage struggling to feed their family to fix this. I would expect the people who are paid to fix it to get their sleeves rolled up though.

Yes.

@JustALittleHelpPlease I agree with you. We shouldn't be talking like this is a temporary situation that has come from nowhere. People have not been paid properly for a long time.

Laughable suggestion

Is it though? People are being priced out of simply existing, if your badly paying job doesn’t even keep you vaguely above water then why bother with it?

The theory is no one works for a company that pays massive wage to ceo
so no one works for them they pay ceo a normal high wage and the spare cash bumps everyone’s wages up
If the entire workforce of Tesco walked out tomorrow then it might happen
but in the real world what is the chance of that happening
we need practical solutions not idealistic ideas that will never happen

I think the whole system needs reviewing to be honest

• minimum wage isn't enough for people to live on alone but a good number of these people will get top-ups from UC or tax credits

• there are people working very few hours or only 1 person working in a couple receiving more than 2 people working - work should pay people shouldn't think "it's not worth it I'd be worse off" that's ridiculous

• there is mention of nurses and midwives on this but the whole NHS paybands system need reviewing, £1400 a year extra for lower paybands is quite frankly an insult and they've been on about it for ages it's now August and nobody has seen a penny extra of this insulting gesture.

• minimum wage only gets to the higher amount once someone is 25 and there should be at a rate for 16 year olds, then again at 18 - 16 year olds to get experience then a rise at 18 but it's unfair to pay those age 25 or over a lot more and it would also sort out employers putting people on zero hour contracts (especially in retail and hospitality!) and giving all the hours to the younger "cheaper" staff which seems common

• however as a side note zero hour contracts need closely regulating fo ensure nobody is penalised

The issue is some small businesses would struggle to pay their staff say £15 but the current rates are simply not enough to live on

I'd like to see the CEO of Tesco's reaction if that happened.

He wouldn't be laughing.

He'd be scared.

If the entire workforce of Tesco walked out tomorrow then it might happen

but in the real world what is the chance of that happening

I’m not sure but the chances are increasing every day. In truth none of us know how people are going to react or the extent of the economic crisis. I wouldn’t knock it off the table just yet.

we need practical solutions not idealistic ideas that will never happen

Well, we’ve needed practical solutions, at governmental level, for over a decade and that’s not happened. Any practical solution is going to take time, cost money (debt) and real leadership. Idealistic ideas are as real a possibility as practicalities currently.

Did you learn maths at school?
How many ‘CEOs etc’ earning many hundreds of thousands do you think that there are ?
Let’s say that there are 10,000 people in the U.K. earning at least £500k per year. You take £300k per annum off each of them, presumably before tax so that’s a load of income tax revenue gone, and somehow redistribute it as a boost to minimum wage.
Can you do the sums? (obviously not) In case not, I will. You’d get £3 million BILLION Add up the zeros Good idea 10,000 x 300,000 = 3,000,000,000. Let’s say that there are 1 million people working for minimum wage. How much extra would they get per year? If it helps, divide 3 million by 1 million. The answer is an extra £3 per year. Each.
Actually they would get £3,000
This has been explained so many times on this thread. It’s depressing.

This thread has so many examples of poor maths, I feel that there may be some Government ministers present.