Demand for minimum wage hike is too high?

[worriedniece]

I just read this article which demands minimum wage be put up to £15 an hour. www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-silent-minimum-wage-15-pounds-keir-starmer/

I am a little flabbergasted. I worked out that working 52weeks a year on £15 an hour would equate to a salary of 31k Now given that newly qualified teachers earn £25k a year, a junior doctor is on £29k it seems comparably high. It sort of makes me wonder what's the incentive to go and train for a job/go to uni when you can earn nearly as much working in Tesco. I might be being naive, b it surely a minimum is just that- it's a bare minimum and employers should incentivise the best workers by offering more?

Perhaps the over 40s should pay more tax to compensate for the higher housing cost burden placed on younger generations.

many over 40's are on NMW and you want to tax them more????

@stopitstopitnow

I talking about homeowners, and I don't think that it's anymore unfair that increasing tax on people earning over 50k

Say that:

Person A is a young person who earns 60k but has a large mortgage having purchased a house in recent years

Person B is earning 30k but mortgage free or has a tiny mortgage

It's clear that person B is far better off. Perhaps assets should be considered equal to income in terms of taxation.

I guess what I'm saying is that it should be wealth, rather than income, which is taxed, because taking income is very unfair on younger generations who are struggling to buy homes.

Except they wouldn’t would they!
They’d stay the same and then a junior Doctor will be on the same as a shelf stacker.

Then of course the coat of things will skyrocket too.

£15 per hour is a crazy minimum wage.

And that’s a false equivalence comparing them to a govt of so-called millionaires.

Do you understand basic economics.

I think minimum wage is too simplistic.

Of course everyone should get a proper wage, but put it up to these kinds of levels and almost everyone else is going to need a payrise too. We've already seen it where I work, the lowest bands have had to be abolished because everyone's on the same pay and of course there should be some differentiation for greater slills/responsibility.

Increasing everyone's pay will fuel inflation and get us back to square one anyway where "good" slaries have little buying power and an awful lot of min wage jobs are public sector, so taxes will need to increase to pay for them (or services cut which will put people out of jobs altogether).

So just because you've gone to university you'd rather see essential workers such as supermarket staff or refuse workers kept in poverty? It really isn't a race to the bottom you know, and everyone works bloody hard.
For most graduate employees it's their starting salaries that are nearer the bottom end of the scale, and if it isn't then they should be attacking the government for higher wages, not wishing those who they see as doing lower jobs than them to be kept on a low wage and in their place

Of course you don’t want to see them in poverty.

But they also don’t have £50k worth of debt that they have to pay back with interest.

And realistically unskilled Labour is just that. Doesn’t mean you’re less of a person, no. But anybody can’t stack shelves.

Far fewer trained to teach, fewer again trained to be Doctors.

It’s a disincentive to train and incur debt dor a skilled job.

Posted too soon

…if you can avoid significant debt and earn the same.

(this is really why true communism can never work in practice).

This is an interesting concept.

Many people's income are a mix of their employer(s) and the government, and while I agree with other previous posters on how the government needs to work on improving access to housing and other needs and services, something that brings the issue that the 'minimum wage' is already a variable concept between the silly different age ones and the government additions to it in a way that pushed the huge corporations to pay their share while supporting small businesses is an interesting one.