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 agree. I am above minimum wage but below £15 PH.

Simply increasing MW is not the answer, I feel it would do more harm than good. Capitalism would ensure prices go up along with any wage rises to null and increase.

Similar to how I feel the benefits system is, just to keep doleing out more ie the £650 grant isn't the answer.

Less vat and taxes to reduce cost of living is how I'd go.

I'm no economist of course though!

The minimum wage and the cost of living are two separate things.

The conflation between the two does not help. Its lazy and reflects poor economic understanding.

This.

But this won't solve that. I don't think anyone has said we shouldn't do anything at all, have they? Just highlighted this isn't the answer.

it'd be by far the highest minimum wage in the world. given that we're not nearly the richest (per head) country in the world then, yes, it does raise some serious questions. would have very serious implications for more industries than you might think.

But you've been told repeatedly that this is not how it works by many posters

I dont understand how «hard» some posters think people should work just to have the opportunity to have a decent place to live and enough money to buy food, clothes, electricity and furniture?
without getting top ups from the state.

you, the taxpayer in the UK, are effectively subsidising all business and all landlords to a ridiculous degree. Why should people not have a decent standard of living whilst stacking shelves in asda?

But this solution won't solve that, is it that hard of a concept to grasp?

Is it still 1974? Who still talks about ‘pay grades’? Maybe it is time to move out of the public sector and experience the real world.

To your point, can you really not see why somebody would do a more responsible and ‘stressful’ job for the same pay as a less-responsible manual job? Really?

Can you see that when somebody is building a career they might want to build their experience and skills? When I started my accountancy training in a Big 4 firm I wasn’t earning much more than I would have earned working in River Island but I was building a professional career. That was my motivation. Is that so difficult to imagine?

So I’m on 40k and those who work probably harder it bothers you if they get paid more? Wow
simple fact if a household are out working full time then there should be zero need for wage tops ups, housing benefit etc. They should be paid a decent and fair wage to pay their bills end of story.

There will always be an correlation between how much you earn and how specialised/in demand your trade is, qualification and experience. Which is right, not everyone can be a nurse, plumber, barrister, teacher, dr. People need to be incentivised into skilled/in demand areas.

You’d have to raise the wages of everyone to keep people in these positions. That’s just fact and many skilled areas/trades already have critical shortages.

Many firms would go to the wall. Look at the teacher pay rise which schools can’t afford as they haven’t been given the money. The small Italian down the road, the small chain of family cleaners, the small construction business so on and so forth. They can’t afford to fund massive pay rises. It will result in huge job losses and companies collapsing. For example, many schools are talking about redundancies and condensing classes. This has just happened at my dc’s school. That on a national scale in all industry.

Wages go up, everyone will have to earn more so inflation rises more and everyone is in the same position they started, just not well of on £15 an hour.

The big firms shareholders are often pension funds not an anonymous billionaire claiming dividends. The CEOs in the large companies earn a lot, they will also pay a lot of tax. Once you’ve taken that out the difference won’t go far for a pay rise in large multinationals.

Economic education should be compulsory in schools, it’s staggering how many don’t have even a basic grasp.

Nobody is saying that people shouldn't have all of the above.

Every single poster here who said this would affect other workers on higher wages, though, has pointed out the knock-on effect this would have to have on anyone currently earning above minimum wage.

@JustALittleHelpPlease I quoted the wrong post, and reported to get it deleted.

But as someone who has worked with businesses who are trying to grow/survive for 10 years. My hands on experience is this is exactly how it works. Increase costs = increase prices to maintain profits OR automate more to reduce overheads (I.e cut jobs)

Your knowledge of economics is very very poor…you’ve made sweeping assumptions with no real knowledge of how things work.

you’ve also done like the Facebook GPs who know more about vax than doctors. Here you act like you know more about economics than those working in the treasury

A job is not just necessarily about the pay but also conditions. Many people here are saying they would quit their jobs to work in a supermarket as they wouldn't be better off but many people seem to forgetting the 'perks' they may get in their currently higher paid jobs.

Many minimum wage jobs don't pay sick pay, give you the absolute minimum amount of days off, involve late starts and early finishes, shift work, not being able to access drinks or even the toilet easily, spoken to like rubbish by both customers and management, told you can be replaced anytime, enforced overtime - I know of people in retail who have worked 3 weeks solid. Question this and you'll be out the door. Have your hours changed at little notice and be told you shouldn't make plans on your days off in case you are needed. The list goes on.

@dianthus101 I certainly do my job because I love it, but it is incredibly hard work and long hours. Not everyone will stay out of love if they can get better hours and less stress in Tesco.

I completely support an increase in minimum wage. It is ridiculous to think that anyone working full time should be unable to buy food, have safe housing and keep themselves warm over winter. Increase minimum wage and offer support to the necessary industries which cannot afford it (eg childcare, elderly care, food production). If that means some businesses only make half their previous profits, then tough. If the only way to make your unnecessary business profitable is to exploit poverty stricken workers or to rely on government topping up their wages then your business isn’t sustainable.

I’d like to see the government actually address the root causes of the high cost of living too though (housing being a perennial problem that almost nobody wants to fix, energy costs which everyone wants to fix but takes a long time).

When we were in Denmark minimum wage was really high(around this I think) but so were lots of wages- a lot of quite average office jobs paying around £38k.

The thing is they had high minimum wage, huge tax (around 46%) but no NI, no council tax , cheap public transport and childcare full time at around £240 a month- so most couples with kids worked. There was also lots of very good quality social housing (for Danes) so whilst a lot of couples were bringing home around £3800 equivalent, even with 2 kids their childcare and rent were around £1300. Leaving around £2500 , no council tax etc. The tax take was high and so services were good.

It benefitted young families a lot, it didn't benefit older workers with no kids or single people if any age (apart from cheap good quality housing) but the mentality was different - it was seen as for the common good.

People always say, yes but it's expensive. The only thing I thought was very expensive was eating and drinking out - (that's because people are well paid). So we just did Less if it and more 'brunches' - less evening meals out.

Of course they should have a decent standard of living but raising the minimum wage won't do that. Other wages will also have to go up and there would be massive inflation. Then the people on minimum wage would be no better off than they were before it was raised.

Don’t worry we have a Tory government so it will never happen.

This ^
Spot on @Cornettoninja

YABU

Inflation is coming from energy prices and these prices are set on the international market.

A rise in minimums wage wouldn't mean that these people are suddenly rushing out to stock up on luxuries, it will mean being able to afford the basics (I.e. food and energy).

Everyone deserves a wage to live on and current NMW doesn’t reflect that. If businesses go bust because they have to pay a real living wage it probably wasn’t a very viable busses to start with.

Thats irrelevant to people under 40 in reality who are unlikely to get much of a pension full stop due to the current economic reality.

We can not get away from the issue that the over 65 are net benefiaries from the tax system whilst those under 40 will be net contributors over the courses of their whole life. We really have a situation where the elderly have taken away from subsequent generations.

You might be fine if you have elderly relatives who will leave money to you, but if you aren't then you have been structurally screwed.

Much of our current political problems owe much to our politicians only serving the interests of a single generation, rather than future planning and considering the impact on future generations because that would have involved unpopular political decision making at the time. Instead issues were kicked down the line, and have got significantly worse until they have developed into massive crisis which may mean our current level of lifestyle and world influence is unsustainable. People warned about things like private investment in building hospitals because of the cost at the time, but it was ignored. Its now catching up with us and people are complaining about how public sector wages haven't kept pace - there's a good reason for that... And on top of that we have a decline in health because of a rise in poverty. So again, demographic timebomb.

This is down to political demographics and populism. This has massively disadvantaged younger generations who haven't had the voting power to assert themselves.

The number of people I know in their 50s taking early retirement in the last year is unreal. This is something that those under 40 are unlikely to ever be able to dream of - and their state retirement age is going up - even as life expectancy has dropped. This makes the pool of the working age population smaller as the retired age population swells in size. Again, another time bomb - we need more health care workers at a time when we have less workers overall. We need people to be skilled. People with degrees in the right fields are important. We need people with higher levels of education than we did even 20 years ago. Because this reflects the changing needs of the workplace. We need higher skill levels in most areas.

There will come a generational demographic tipping point at some point. At this point, I think there's going to be a cliff edge in terms of how the elderly are treated because of this demographic time bomb.

Equally though, I don't believe that the unions necessarily represent the interests of the general population either. On a number of scores. There is a self serving internal political system within the unions thats rife with sexism, racism and a dreadful toxic culture of bullying and silencing of debate in the name of progressiveness.

We have a problem. A living standards issue. One thats hard to see a way out of being solved when we have more people as a state to support.

Our benefits system is built on a pyramid scheme set up. One thats about to break.