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?

I meant they would quit their jobs as doctors altogether not just the NHS. Many are leaving already.

Doctors who do private work usually also work for the NHS, often full time hours for the NHS. They generally only do private work as consultants which will mean they have worked for the NHS for many years. Are you saying that people who work as doctors can't do any other job even if it's in addition to NHS work?

Why is ok to accept people living on poverty wages who then have to rely on top ups and are demonised for doing so? All to save these small businesses - without actually testing how big a problem it really would be.

We have a massive problem with international organisations pushing down wages on the basis that they’re global and can threaten to offshore jobs. That is the problem with the current model of capitalism that we face.

Has anyone done an assessment of businesses that would actually fold if they paid £15/hour?

If you pay people more - then they can afford more….. That includes spending money on small businesses.

Plenty of big companies pay shit wages - Amazon being a classic example. The public sector is another example - outsourcing jobs on the cheap to companies when they could pay directly and pay higher wages. Think of care homes, cleaners etc. Those things alone would make a massive difference to the state of the economy and rebalance wealth a bit.

@beachcitygirl
Sadly the last Labour government introduced tax credits which was bloody lunacy. Thus creating a situation where exactly that happened

that 's a complete myth, the Tories introduced family income support in 1971, supposed to be a temporary solution..... BUT the need was there though and support for working families grew, by the time the WFTC was introduced by labour in 1999, there were 1.5m people claiming support and the need has grown and grown ever since, whatever name its called.

Mainly, not due to low wages but the cost of housing, as benefits like these have always been means tested.

If we returned to mass cheap rent council housing, we'd not need such a high MW & the benefits would be lower and councils/govt would have an appreciating asset.

My parents got nothing before 1971, the level of poverty then was shocking amongst people working on low wages. Family allowance was to life those families with very low earners out of dire poverty. Tax credits was just a rename.

Why would it not be right? 25 miles isn't that far. It's not a new thing for people to travel to work.

25 miles commute is 50 miles a day and many cars that’s a gallon of petrol - £8 a day to go to work

all that nurse wanted was a social rented house but not enough are built and she couldn’t rent locally due to being on her own and not satisfying estate agents “affordability” criteria

if she quits that area as it’s too expensive that’s going to leave these areas with shortages of nurses and key workers - recycling emptiest, superworkers, teachers, carers

why should they commute and spend £50 a week to get to work when they can transfer- so rural areas will lose more facilities if they don’t get wage rises to correspond with housing prices and renting

It's really complicated but I can't be opposed to paying low paid people more when things are as they are.

Yes, it'd be inflationary initially but people will stop paying for things once prices of non essentials reach certain thresholds. Unfortunately that means businesses with small margins will go under and their minimum wage employees will need to find work elsewhere. Will that work exist?

Has anyone done an assessment of businesses that would actually fold if they paid £15/hour?
The public sector would collapse first. Early career nurses and teachers, college lecturers and support staff, absolutely tons of essential public sector employees earn less than £15 per hour.

No, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do extra private work at all, but I don't agree with the state paying for the training if they're going to use it to make loads of money in private practice. Perhaps saying that they have to be full time in the NHS is too much, but there should be a minimum number of hours that they have to work in the NHS in order to avoid repaying the fees. I don't think that's unreasonable.

If people earn more, they are taxed more, plus less has to paid out in tax credits etc.
Yes, service industry costs will go up, but not so much on goods.

I don't know if anyone has done an assessment of what the impact would be, but I do know that profit margins are very tight on many businesses, such as the cafe where my dd works. You only have to look at how many small businesses fold because they struggle to make a profit even with wages as they are. Most small charities would fold, unless the government bailed them out in some way. And the school where I'm a governor struggles to make its budget balance already, so it would need more government money to keep it going as well.

The reality is that many small and medium businesses simply couldn't carry on operating with wage bills that high. So someone would need to create new business models that made it viable to employ unskilled labour on £15 an hour in order to replace all of the jobs that would be lost in the sectors that ceased to be viable.

Alternatively, I suppose some private businesses might survive if they could pass enough of the increased costs on to their customers. If everyone was willing to pay much more because they had more money in their pockets, I suppose this might be achievable. I am not sure that the lowest paid would necessarily be any better off in reality though, because they would just be buying the same stuff at higher prices, but I guess their salaries would look better on paper. Unfortunately, the public sector and the voluntary sector don't get to pass on increased costs in quite the same way, so their services would almost certainly have to be cut back or discontinued.

@Anothernamechangeplease You are aware they pay for their own training now? While working in the NHS.

I am paying my student loans back while working in the NHS. I never had a single penny of my training paid by the NHS or the government and in fact I worked unpaid for 3 years during my training. I owe them nothing!

Yes, I'm well aware that doctors have to pay back their student loans, obviously. But as far as I am aware, the student loans don't reflect anything like the full cost of training a doctor, so I'm not quite sure how you never had anything paid towards your training. Did you have to pay the additional costs on top of your tuition fees?

I am well aware of how hard doctors have to work to get to where they are, and I absolutely think we need to do something about the terrible working conditions in the NHS in order to reduce the number of people burning out/wanting to leave. If you read what I said above, I would actually reduce what NHS doctors and dentists would have to pay back, by limiting their liability to the tuition fees that would be paid by students doing any standard 3 year degree. (Ideally, I would scrap the tuition fees for medics and nurses altogether if I could.) I just don't think the state should subsidise the very expensive studies of people who want to work in the private sector.

True, the cost of imported goods wouldn't go up as much, though they would still be affected by the wages of people transporting them, packing them on the shelves, selling them etc.

UK manufacturing would largely be wiped out, though.

The answer is that capitalistic greed has gone awry. The minimum wage should be £15 an hour, of course nurses, midwives, teachers, should be earning more than that. But this stinking bunch of Tory filth would rather have their shareholders bank profits than invest in the country and its talent. We are in for a very bad time in the UK.

It would be great if minimum wage was £15 per hour but the only trouble is prices of everything goes up to compensate for employers having to pay out this extra money so nobody is every any better off. for example I used to work in a small independent shop on min wage and each time minimum wage risen our employer would increase prices of everything in the shop to compensate I noticed this happened everywhere too.

It’s almost like tax credits, as a means of wealth distribution for the poorest, were a good idea.

If you think CEO’s keep all the profits then being honest, no wonder the civil service is in dire straits….

I hate that quote, which is incorrectly repeated parrot fashion from an early 2000s politician:

1. we are actually 6th on terms of GDP having recently been overtaken by India
2. we are 25th in terms of GDP per person which is a more realistic measure of our wealth

Bottom line, we are no longer that wealthy

It’s ridiculous. If they change my min wage job to £15 per hr then my husband needs to be paid about a million a year.

one perfect way to stoke inflation 😭

Indeed!

I work for a charity, I earn more than minimum wage but less than 15 an hour. If all of our salaries have to go up to £15/h I expect we will go bankrupt, or a large number of us will lose our jobs

Surely the answer is to radically reform our housing system so that housing costs come back in line with household earnings? I'd be in favour of banning private landlords altogether (or making it possible only through some sort of housing association), nationalising rented housing (or making it all non-profit) and completely detaching housing costs from market forces. Housing is a basic need not a luxury consumer good. Ditto energy and water. Pushing wages up is just going to fuck small businesses and charities, and push all prices up anyway.

The great majority are already working a minimum number of hours for the NHS at the same time though. For the few consultants that are entirely private, I'm not sure what's to be gained in making them quit as doctors entirely. It certainly won't help NHS waiting lists.

@Bard6817 I never said the ceo keeps the profit. I said if the minimum wage goes up to £15, then the ceo/directors/boards of companies should be made to not raise prices inline to protect profit but reduce the level of profits retained and distributed via dividends to shareholders etc to actually make the £15 per hour wage an actual increase in real terms.

My whole point of the comment I made was profits must be sacrificed to increase the wage, which won't happen, so £15 per hour minimum wage will just be the catalyst for costs to go up, removing any benefit of an increased wage.

If the great majority are already working a substantial number of hours for the NHS (we haven't discussed where the minimum requirement should be set), then my proposals would not impact on them negatively at all. Quite the contrary, I am saying that NHS doctors should pay less towards their training, not more.

Some consultants might leave the profession if they had to work in the NHS or if they had to repay more of their tuition costs, I suppose, but I am not sure that losing people who are motivated solely by how much money they can make are really the kind of doctors that we want anyway.

The taxpayer needs to fund the NHS properly so that NHS staff have decent working conditions and patients are able to access the care that they need. I don't think the taxpayer needs to fund the training of doctors and dentists who choose to exploit the current under resourcing of the NHS to make money privately.