About half of British workers earn under £15 hour - new Living Wage?

[Melisha]

At the moment about half of the workforce earns under £15 an hour. We need to increase national minimum wage to £15 an hour, lifting many of the workforce out of poverty.
Do you agree NMW should be £15 an hour?

I agree.

I keep seeing all these jobs ads where employers ask for a fair amount of experience/skills and a long list of duties that one person is supposed to take on for very low pay in return.

Certainly not a salary that would not give anyone any kind of a decent living...

Charities, social care, schools, civil service, retail, hospitality, arts, libraries...all the sectors got used to paying peanuts for admin and frontline staff while people at the top make a lot of money.

There is a cost to us all as well become the tax payer also ends up having to contribute to prop up these low wages through benefits. That's a really perverse system.

There are too many inequalities now in the job market and that needs to be redressed.

But of course another big issue is the cost of living: utility bills and housing costs in this country are completely disproportionate to how much most people earn...

Unfortunately, increasing NMW on its own isn't enough.

I've always been a NMW earner and honestly, I'm no better off now than I was a few years ago when NMW was £8.50. I pay more tax and NI and the cost of living has increased significantly.

Honestly, when they announced the last wage rise, my response was "ffs", because I knew, that means an increase again in tax and NI, an increase in my supermarket shop, an increase in bills etc. The cost of raising the NMW is always passed onto the consumer.

Don't get me wrong, I don't know what the answer to the problem actually is, but it definitely isn't raising NMW alone

I'm on a low wage. Everytime wages increase cost of living rises and UC goes down so I never improve my actual real situation.

Putting wages up only works if other costs don't rise alongside.

What people earn is less of the issue thsn what people have to pay for basics such as utilities, housing etc

But higher wages wouldn't solve this. Landlords would just put the rent up.

I don't have the answer but the answer lies in bringing the cost of items down not in bringing wages up.

In a cafe, if everyone was on £15, the food would rise. The head waitress would want more than the new waitress, the cook more than the cleane, so prices would rise.

Whatever minimum wage is is what the poorest workers in society are on. Everyone else would get an uplift.

Companies also shouldn't be allowed to pay out to shareholders while their staff are dependent on tax payer funded benefits because their wages are too low to live on.

This is interesting.

Hasn't Labour said they are increasing to an actual living wage? I'm sure I read it somewhere

The starting pay for a doctor is about £14 meaning their wages will have to be raised as well- how are the government going to afford this? I think its unlikely labour would actually raise NMW

My lovely Mum is 70 next month and still works FT as a carer on NMW and whilst I totally agree it is not as simple as what you are saying. I have been a Nurse for 20 odd years and have worked my way up the banding. If you uplift the bottom you have to uplift all the bandings and tiers within it as the difference between them marginal. It will therefore cost the NHS ££££££ to implement and I cannot see that happening any time soon. But don't get me started on the billions spent paying private agency workers and their owners 😡

Switzerland is a good example. They have a very good level of minimum wage but it is hideously expensive to live there. We have relatives over there and went to visit, by god it cost us a fortune to eat out and buy food.

The problem is not everybody gets an uplift, so the 'skilled' jobs get fewer as why be a headchef when the sous chef gets the same salary for less stress.

I'm near the £15 value for a strategy role, I'll be immediately applying for a basic admin position if they're £15 an hour, my role surely wouldn't increase the difference so I'm not dealing with that extra stress and expectation to work into the night for nmw

Same here I earn £14.40 per hour after years of training and experience, often dealing with difficult people day in day out.

Actually I hadnt realised how much this was, so for comparison a newly qualified SW in a good LA paying a good starting wage is on around £16ph

Theres no way that should be comparable with someone stacking shelves or moving trollies.

Not at our charity there isn't. We have around 50 employees, and a similar number of volunteers. No one earns much and the head of the charity earns nothing at all. Our main expense is wages. Any rise in NMW means redundancies and brings the whole charity close to bankruptcy.

They uplifted bottom of scale pay for teachers but not the top.

Top band 5 for NHS is £34581 bottom band 6 is £35392. What would be incentive of going up to a band 6 with all of the responsibility that entails if band 5 pay was uplifted?

Some job rolls that require entry level qualifications are only paid 0.60p to £1 above minimum wage now. Because it's slightly above minimum wage and so business owners, think that's acceptable. It's not.

It's a fantastic idea. Would go some way to cutting in work benefits.

the irony of the persistence of low pay in a capitalist society is that the government ends up paying a huge amount of in-work benefits -so is effectively subsidising business's to pay low wages. i can never get my head round that.

Oh yes. And on the thread about someone earning a high salary and doing little work, anyone who didn't buy into it was sneered at and told that it was evident that they weren't equipped to get a job like that.

Not popular but the benefit system should be extended for single, childfree people (which now with the rise in working age affects everyone). If wages rise, people get less, it doesn't help anyone. Water and electricity should be re-nationalised, or profits taxed. Share the wealth and investment up north. The S/SE/London wouldn't be in the predicament it is re housing if everything hadn't have been shifted down there from the North in the 70/80's. Get rid of the bedroom tax so the three bed HA housing stock can be put to better use. Families with two children under 10 are stuck in private rents while the three beds get rented on a house share basis, or sold off because they can't house smaller Families in them. Wages are only a part of the issue. Personally I'd put conditions on the amount of hours offered so real jobs are created. Then work towards people being self sufficient, however we'll have another Tory government by then, so people will be put back into poverty.

"UC reduces by 45p for every extra pound you earn so there's no "big chunk" that you lose, it's very straightforward. There's no limit to hours you can work on UC."

Yes, but I know people that see that 45p as free money they've "lost". It's a mindset. They see it coming off the UC payment and start moaning about it "not being worth it to work"

It's similar to the childcare trap women get into, enabling their husbands to continue working whilst damaging their own careers because "it's not worth me working to pay childcare".

Paula V, senior police, senior hospital bosses etc have blown the idea that these people deserve the wages they get.

Gross.

It would massively distort the pay bands. If you're a more experienced nurse earning say £8ph more than the lowest bands, that would potentially be cut to £3ph. Why would you bother? Similarly if you're a care supervisor on £14ph and you'll be uplifted to the same rate as the workers you supervise.

To proportionately increase everyone's wage would mean across the board increases of 30%. There's 6 million public sector workers so where's that coming from?

And what do you suppose happens to the cost of goods when a company has to increase its labour bill by 30%? All you do is shift the poverty point from A to B as prices rise and taxes increase.