I keep reading about the UK's "productivity problems" and have to admit here that I'm a part of it.
I earn about 90k full-time.
But I'm in Scotland, so I pay thousands of £s more in taxes vs. my English family members. (No, i didn't benefit from free university, but I do get free prescriptions and eye tests.)
I have a very responsible, senior, stressful role. I also have small DC (and a husband that more than pulls his weight at home, works part time, and his job has been impacted worse by taking the sick days/drop offs and pickups etc).
I'm about to go into my annual performance review chat in 2 week's time and my C-level line manager is going to ask my career plan to get to the next grade.
I need to formulate a narrative which is a more polite version of:
"I'm good at my job. My customers love me, my colleagues ask to work with me, you know it already. But I can't handle the stress that comes with being at the "next level up". And even if I did want the extra responsibility, why would I, it's not worth the net pay increase. Can I go 4 days a week instead?"
I've crunched the numbers - by the time I factor in the loss of child benefit, the tax/NI cliff at 43k-50k, extra Scottish rate of income tax at £75k, and then potentially the whammy at a new potential salary of 100k... I'm not even convinced that my last promotion was worth it vs. the responsibility and stress, never mind my supposed next one. I'd rather look at ways to reduce my work level because just automatically doing more more more more... i'm not seeing the reward being proportionate in future.
This is the first year I've started to think like this - i've just adjusted my pension contributions to start reducing my income to offset the tax pressures further; I've always paid into my pension but now it's the first year I've done it as a direct result of the tax situation making it nonsensicle not to salary sacrifice down as much as possible.
Before I became a stressed, frazzled mess of a mother, i was head down for years thinking hard work pays off. In my case, it mostly has, don't get me wrong.. but I can now see why others are saying F this and stepping back. That's not a workforce productivity problem, that's a "workers choosing to opt out of the craziness if they have a choice" problem.
I know i'm in a privileged position to talk like this. But until someone does something about the relative levels of tax, NI, and net income cliffs that exist in the UK tax system, more people are going to start to think like me. And that's scary, because we should be incentivising people that working harder/more = rewards more. At the moment, it doesn't feel like that.