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?

Everyone would be affected, its not even about the economy as such, but shops and services raising their prices to account for the higher wages, the wages of those in professional roles either rising proportionately or we suffer even worse shortages than we have now. A junior doctor earns less than £15 an hour, why on earth would anyone bother?!

Minimum wage has caused an awful lot of issues and should be scrapped.

Full time workers shouldn’t need benefits, they should be earning enough to support themselves - that’s on businesses to raise salaries online with inflation.

An experienced worker should not be paid the same as a new starter, whatever the trade.

We should be raising salaries annually based on hard work leading to reward.

YANBU OP. In an ideal world, minimum wage would be higher and that rise would be taken out of profits and therefore dividends. However, rightly or wrongly, SLTs are more interested in keeping the shareholders happy than they are in keeping the "unskilled" minimum wage workers happy.
In reality, an increase in minimum wage would lead to higher prices.

It's also worth noting that it's only the bigger companies that are paying out millions to shareholders. My family runs a small leisure facility with small profit margins - there is no million pound profit to eat into to feed wage increases. Therefore, wage increases would have to lead to price increases, which would of course lead to inflation.

YABU. "Person on £40K doesn't thing low earners should earn more." This.

Wages should be higher. It's crazy that we have a system where the government massively tops up wages through tax credits etc, this is basically subsidising businesses from having to pay wages that are enough to live on. If minimum wages were enough to live on the benefits bill would be a lot lower surely?

It wouldn't. I still get top up benefits and that won't change anytime soon

They tried that with teachers. QTS used to have an element of literacy, numeracy and ICT you had to pass and at one point, only graduates with a 2.1 and or a First were considered. That soon passed because no one wanted to do the job. Now we're at a point where almost anyone with a pulse will do, conditions are THAT dire, and we are STILL missing the recruitment target.

Societal attitudes towards education need changing, but that will take generations and would require long-term investment (and, yes, more incentives for potential teachers - what Physicist honestly contends with teaching when they could earn three times that in industry and be a lot more respected?)

An experienced worker should not be paid the same as a new starter, whatever the trade

We should be raising salaries annually based on hard work leading to reward

that’s an interesting point. I was talking about this the other day. The idea that you can increase your salary with experience is(has?) dying a death. There are many job paths where the only way to increase your wage is to go the management route. Obviously that particular pyramid is never going to lead to financial security for every worker simply because we can’t have a workforce of managers (or highly skilled experts).

Do you think people on low paid jobs dont work/haven't worked hard?

This. During lockdown we had people who were let go and were hired by us. Some of them really couldn't hack the 5:30am starts or the 11pm finishes or didn't want to work weekends. They couldn't cope with how we are treated by the general public or the workload we are expected to cope with, it's way more than "stacking shelves in Tesco."

Absolutely not, those who are not academically minded (my husband for example) should have additional options - apprenticeship, t-levels, hands on training where learning can be done in methods outside of sitting in a classroom, I agree these are VERY much lacking in favour of academic learning.

Also those who do work in the low skilled roles should have fair wages and earn enough to have a comfortable living. They should be able to heat, eat, go on holiday and afford luxuries outside of bare survival.

My point was don't efforts need to be made (by stopping the top businesses upping costs to maintain profits) to stop a wage spiral, as it won't actually benefit the poorest if costs go up inline with wages, won't that just make more people reach that poverty line.

This was always the plan to inflate away the Debt there is literally no all the way out of this hole we can’t pay it back none of us can

I still think the John Lewis Partnership used to have a very good system that meant the highest Paid person could not earn more than 25x the lowest earner (based on FTE) they then increased it I think to x75 or x100 but then 'had to abolish' it because they couldn't retain 'top talent' but if it was legislation (at whatever %) then it would at least help the impact of 'just increase everyone's pay'. Obviously it is more complex than my brain can fathom because of entrepreneurship, accounting tactics and dividends etc but I do think there is something in that principle.

I don’t know at what point government top up wages but on one hand doing this wouldn’t give people more money and increase inflation if that level is met

But the flip side is companies would have to raise prices to afford it which would cause higher inflation. That would be very difficult now

Maybe we could have "Capitalism Light" instead.

Stick a limit on profits/dividends paid out etc. But it would never work, there would be a million loopholes.

Exactly. This shit ALWAYS gets trotted out on these threads. 'Ooooh you shoulda worked harder then, like meeeeeeeeeeeeeee.'' Bore off.

Hear hear!

Absolutely many work hard. I don't think it's unfair to say though that many higher paid roles require a lot of hard work and generally have a higher level of responsibility. I have worked in retail, hospitality, as a cleaner and in a factory- were they hard work? Yes. Do I feel bad for saying that they aren't as challenging as the role I am now in? Nope.

There have been some good explanations by economists recently about why this isn't the case. Inflation has been increasing beyond wages for years now.

The argument 'but no one would want to be nurses and barristers because the wage will be rubbish' if minimum is raised to £15 doesn't wash because those sectors (and more!) are already in some process of strike action atm - because of unfair pay and conditions.

That's not even to mention the crisis we currently have in not having enough nhs staff and the strain it's having on the service

How about instead of holding people down so others don't feel put out we try and raise the standard for as many working people as possible?

Profits are good but out of control and it's at the expense of wages.

Support eachother.
It's not difficult to say low paid workers deserve to be paid enough to live, and say that other sectors deserve much better too. Some people are fighting in the wrong direction.

Why is the concept of companies reducing profits in order to pay their employees a decent wage so abhorrent? The trickle-down economic model doesn't work so why keep doing it?

My point was don't efforts need to be made (by stopping the top businesses upping costs to maintain profits) to stop a wage spiral, as it won't actually benefit the poorest if costs go up inline with wages, won't that just make more people reach that poverty line.

Huge reform is needed in this country and it needs to start with the abolishment of the ideas that:

• education makes you superior


• the tories are a party who want the UK to thrive


• that 'others' are to blame for rising costs that force people into poverty


• that we should just accept constant price rises that ensure whacking great profits

I hope that the general strike that might potentially occur over the autumn and winter months might start to break some of these ideas. But potentially a portion of the tory voters dying off this winter when they cannot afford to heat themselves might also do the trick. And this is people like my parents who voted tory whilst working class because Thatcher enabled them a buy a house in the 70s & 80s and ensure that their children never will be able to afford a house of their own . Sounds awful but we live in awful times. We have the potential to be better but this thread is a good example of why we aren't.

It’s always been the case that the king didn’t need to fight the masses he just needed to tell the pitchfork people to fight the torch people and they all just kill each other without him lifting a finger.

Except most companies wouldn't NEED to increase prices to meet the wages.

They would only need to do that if they were going to continue draining every penny of profit to keep at the very top.

£700million taken in profit for Royal Mail but then telling their staff they need to work more for less?? Sounds like there's plenty to go around there to me.

@ohholyday I don't think it's abhorrent, I genuinely think it's the only way to make a real terms increase in minimum wage without prices just rising in line.
There should be a % of profit allowed before windfall taxes occur. But there would need to be so much reform required before that actually happens.

The Unions either don't understand inflation and educating yourself to degree level to get a high paid job OR they simply are stuck in an ideological nonsense bubble where they merely want communism.

Now whilst capitialism is utterly fucked, I can't exactly see how communism has worked out a whole load better either...

£15 minimum wage doesn't solve the problem. It would be handy if the problem could be correctly identified and we can go from there.

Also can the union leaders who live in council houses whilst taking home £100,000 + salaries please stick their hands up whilst they are also demanding a minimum wage of £15 per hour. Cos y'know...