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?

Couldn't agree more. Too many are fighting eachother when working together will do so much more good

Manager of a small hospitality business.
Most of our staff are paid a little above the minimum wage. Without exception they are hard working and loyal. I know for a fact the owners would like to pay us all more but I've also seen the spreadsheets. Not every business generates massive profits. Small, rural businesses like ours do well to keep afloat actually.
We could raise our prices but then we'd lose customers.
I don't know what the answer is.

National minimum wage is governmental bullshit all the time they keep the personal tax-free allowance to the pittance it is.

The answer is unless your customers are paid more they can’t afford your services so the big companies need to pay their shareholders less which. This will not mean that they cannot afford your services they will just hold less money in savings basically outside of the economy.

by paying people on medium to low incomes more money they will be able to afford your services and they will spend it and your business will be saved anything else is a catastrophe.

@Toddlerteaplease I'm the same, I'm at the top of the NHS pay band 5, I think I get less than £16 per hour but not checked my pay slip recently.
If the minimum wage increases to £15 an hour, then all band 5 NHS workers (nurses, midwives, plus many others) may as well quit and work in a shop for the same pay, less responsibility and better hours. That's unless they significantly increase NHS wages but it would never happen!
Makes my 2 degrees worthless if I can work in a shop for the same pay.

A lot of businesses like this will be struggling right now due to high energy prices and other cost increases

£15 min wage would see many more disappear

It’s easy to think companies have big profits but for many small businesses that’s not the case

YABU. The divide and conquer is strong in this thread. If minimum wage was to go up to people in the little jobs (you know, retail assistants/cleaners/waitresses etc) then the wages of other professions would also go up. The unbridled snobbery of some on here is sickening, looking down your perfect little noses at people who have, in all honesty, got to work hard day in day out for not very much at all. A lot of these jobs involved people working in shops and looking after the general public during the pandemic, who didn’t have the luxury of being furloughed or working from home. Not everyone has the support to go to college/university, some of us had to go straight to work. Not everyone is academically minded. And one more thing, if everyone did retrain, learn a new profession, who would clean the toilets, stack the shelves, man the tills??

It would make companies totally uncompetitive - companies would go out of business then the guy on £15 min wage has no job at all
it is and always has been the fact that some people earn much less than others

@Somethingtoask yep and the idea that you do it because it's your vocation won't last long!

I do have to laugh at the 'why will people aspire to become nurses and teachers and police, when they can work in a supermarket or factory for the same wage?' line people are trotting out. And here's me thinking people went into these 'caring' professions for the love of the job. Clearly not LMFAO!

And God forbid someone slogging their arse off in a factory doing backbreaking work, (and doing anti-social, tiring shifts,) or sitting at a supermarket checkout with very few breaks, (and stacking the shelves and doing the dotcom orders when the checkouts slow down,) gets paid the SAME as the nurses, police, and teachers. I mean they couldn't POSSIBLY work as hard COULD they?

We really need to get past this mindset that only the 'professionals' in 'public service roles work hard. It's untrue, and a fucking insult to hard working people doing manual labour, who didn't have the same opportunities as them to get a university degree! (Or were not quite 'academic' enough.)

As for the people saying 'I am a nurse/police officer/teacher, and if I could get paid the same for working in a supermarket, or working in a factory, I would leave today;' if you're so stressed in your job, then leave. What's stopping you? If it's that you need the salary you're on, then change a few priorities in your life. Downsize your home, have fewer luxuries, have the same lifestyle as the lower earners. You seem to think it's OK for others to earn less, so why not you? Why are you staying in your 'hugely stressful' jobs? Just leave and take one of the lower paid jobs that you consider to be much easier!

And as I said, I was clearly wrong about people being in these professions for the love of the job. How sad.

Your thinking is rather muddled.

It is possible to support a higher minimum wage AND to want to see corporate profits curbed too...

Currently the tax payer supports many people on low wages through benefits so companies get away with paying people peanuts and instead using profits to pay CEOs ever larger salary and shareholders dividends.

I also don't see why we should get lectured by someone who earns £40,000 in a cushy job as to how people on low incomes should just tough it up and shut up...

For society to work properly (and to address the inflation issue) we need to address cost of living. Those working in the lowest paid jobs should be able to afford to live without topping up. This should be the simplest starting point. Benefits should be in place as a safety net for those unable to work, not as a way to enable businesses to pay wages lower than living costs.

Those talking about small businesses failing, they are only working currently because society as a whole is paying the difference between wages and cost of living. This model is not sustainable. The cost of it all is one of many reasons we are here.

Those saying they should earn more because xxxxx reasons. Yes you probably should but that should not mean that those at the bottom have to earn less than it costs to live.

One of the major issues, imo, is that everyone has swallowed the I'm alright Jack narrative. The fear that things could be worse has been so efficiently spread that all anyone can see is that they are ok. The fact society is falling apart is irrelevant (until they get a social housing block on their school playing field)

As a pp said, we need to start again. Look at what the real cost of living is and then look at why it is that. What is being artificially inflated, how can that be addressed. Look at elder care costs, pensions, the whole shooting match. However this would take some actual bravery and a very long term plan. It would take pissing off the big guys who fund governments and protect their profits at all costs. It would take all of the people, all of us, to be brave and stand up and say we don't want to live in a society where the lowest paid are destitute, that we don't want to have people work their entire life and not have enough pension at the end to buy basics, that we want it to be better for everyone involved and that we are prepared to stand up for it.

I love that everyone has decided that most big businesses are run by Scrooge McDuck, diving into a swimming pool full of cash at the end of a hard day flogging the serfs.

Er, no. Even if you took the CEO’s pay and bonus from him or her, in a business that pays minimum wage for some roles, and distributed it amongst the lower paid staff, how much do you think they would get each? Go on, guess.

And ‘the shareholders’ are mostly pension funds and investment funds. Investing ordinary people’s savings. Curse those ordinary people, squeezing the poverty stricken!

But they dont need to go out of business. There is plenty of money to go around.
Instead if allowing royal mail to have £700million in profits, allow them £350million.
Plenty of money is there to pay fair wages which allow people to live.

Do that across the board. No obscene profits, no obscene payouts to shareholders and directors.

Great post @thebutcherswife 😀

Very well said 👍

That doesn't apply at the moment though. Costs of all types are going through the roof. Take your average fast-food franchise - because they're a franchise they can't put prices up and down, they're fixed. They've seen food costs increase massively, they've seen electricity shoot through the roof, they're still paying business rates (albeit at 50% but it's still a big chunk), they're still paying rent, they've got the day to day costs of equipment repairs (which in a business like that where the equipment is always on the go is high) and all the other sundry costs that are increasing because all those businesses are having to put prices up. You start putting minimum wages up that increases NI and pension contributions too automatically, so it's not just minimum wage itself but the add-ons. And those who are already on a bit over minimum wage will also expect to see their wages go up. So where does it come from? Profit. Or more to the point right now it pushes that business into a loss-making position, and then the business folds. That costs all the employees their jobs. And the companies supplying it with goods and services also take a direct hit because their income goes down. And it spirals. Yes you have to pay people enough to live on but right now it's not the answer. Because the average business owner isn't raking it in, they're wondering if they're going to have a business left.

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.
OK - so if you are against in increase to the pitiful minimum wage, what exactly do you propose when you say "something must change"?
How do you expect people to survive, & what is your alternative recommendation?

However by pushing up the minimum wage doesn't that just add additional costs for businesses,
Who do you think should pay those costs, apart from the businesses that are profiting from the exploitation of low-paid workers?

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.
Businesses can absorb those costs instead of handing them out to shareholders.
At the threat of a government-imposed windfall tax.

Surely this only benefits the government with additional income tax?
Not at all.
What do you think is actually bridging the gap between the minimum wage & actually getting enough income to survive on?
In the main - it is Working Tax Credits.
Paid by 'the government' ie you & me - to make up for the shortfall.
Working Tax Credits is one of the biggest legal dodges available to big business. Instead of paying a wage their staff can live on, they underpay, & sit back while the public purse steps in to keep low earners just above the breadline.

In 2015, WTC cost the government £11 billion. That's £11b that should have been paid by corporations, but was instead funded by the public.

I’m not on minimum wage, I’m on £12 per hour and part of that is holiday pay as I work in school so we don’t get annual leave as such. I get paid for 39 weeks per year and due to budget cuts my hours have been cut and I don’t actually earn enough to pay tax. BUT I don’t want a raise to £15 per hour - that would simply mean the school couldn’t afford the wage bill of all the support staff so there would be even more redundancies. Many employers simply can’t afford a higher wage.

Paying higher wages means higher costs, means higher prices, means pay is then less in real terms, means people want higher pay, - rinse and repeat.

It would be pointless to do this. £15 min wage is over 30k a year for a 40 hour a week job. If they paid that to people in unskilled jobs those currently paid 30k a year for more skilled jobs would also expect a salary rise or they would stop doing the skilled jobs and look for ones that didn't that didn't require skill or responsibility.. This would lead to a massive increase in inflation and we would be back to square one.

There are so many small independent businesses though who just afford today’s costs

eg restaurants, cafes, garden centre (ours just closed so sad)

Right now £15 wage would finish many of them off

People also work to support themselves. It’s outrageous to suggest that someone who has chosen to study a professional career, get £££££ in debt should be paid the same as someone who hasn’t. The pity party needs to stop. I grew up in poverty and took myself off to night school to get a degree as an adult to make sure I was sorted. I was homeless as a child and had to leave education to work.

The entitlement that people who go out of their way for personal progression should be paid the same as those who don’t is staggering. Communism doesn’t work.

The problem with your argument is if low paid workers unskilled themselves and get a better paid job, the person who moves into their old job faces the same problem.
I don't think many people go into medicine for the money. You can earn much more in other sectors, and still there is a surplus of bright youngsters willing to train to be doctors
I think minimum wage increases need to come from economies and cutting back on the salaries of high earners.

Skills are skills and should be recognised as such. They still are, currently, but not to the degree they should.

There are so many people on here wanting to dismiss the hard work that education to beyond GCSE level entails - do you really think that unskilled work should be paid the same as skilled?

And no, we are not talking academic snobbery here - there is a reason plumbers, electricians and joiners earn such a high amount of money (I was recently told by a carpet shop that many of their carpet layers would not even get out of bed for less than £400/ day) - it's because we value the knowledge and expertise that they have. So why talk those with academic knowledge, acquired over many years, down and call them snobs?

Hard work and the desire to learn must be rewarded fairly.

So no, I fully disagree with the notion that people who have put years into a degree should be earning the same as those who have dropped out of school and education.

This. This. This.
And our governments are so in their pockets too.

Everything must change. But it won’t, because our MPs are mainly setting up their futures for when they are no longer MPs rather than caring for the country. And I don’t just mean the Tories either.