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?

Wages should take into account the skills and training required for the job. That shouldn’t be controversial imo

Wait…so you’re agreeing raising the NMW will make it worse for employers trying to fill the (slightly) higher paid /higher responsibility roles?

I agree with @Blushingm

everyone below a certain amount should get a pay rise at this point , not just the ones at the very bottom. I’m sure the NMW went up quite recently and a lot of middle earners wages didn’t.

But Costa is not public sector and funded by the government.

It is like when people argue that nurses should earn as much as footballers (or footballers earn as little as nurses). Different sectors and different budgets.

Now, if Costa employed nurses, you would have a point.

@User2460177 Your costs were lower? Do you mean you were on NMW before you had a family? Or even when still living with parents?
Being young and on NMW with no kids us very different.
The thread is full of people in private sector saying they do very little work for high wages.

The original poster is saying (I think) unskilled jobs like baristas for example shouldn’t be getting government mandated wage increases that lift their salary above nurses. So it is a relevant comparison.

@Cobbledstreets I am saying the NMW should be £15 an hour. Lots of professionals start on a low wage, but rise much higher.

But your often not better off, if tesco , hairdressers , nurseries etc all have to pay their staff £15 an hour , where do you think they get that extra money from, by raising costs for customers , therefore you may bring home more, but your money doesn’t go any further . So your not better off in reality

Throughly agree. It blows my mind. Why, on earth, are we happy to pay benefits that allow big business to underpay staff? It’s actually mad. If you are working you should earn enough to live.

@healthadvice123 Tescos and the like pay large payouts to shareholders and senior executives. That increases prices for everyone. Maybe if we want prices to fall, those large payouts could be reduced?

What's the national average wage work out at per hour?

It’s always a tricky balance. I work for the LA and take home 12.70 ph. If my wages go up then council tax goes up , cost of everything else goes up as labour costs are higher across the board. I earnt £5k more last year than the year before and it pretty much got swallowed up by increased col.

@Andthereitis the national average wage is not calculated per hour, Which is why it is slightly misleading. Many low paid people do lots of extra hours so they have enough to live on.

@Sosorryliver If that is your take home pay, you are probably on about £15 per hour already. More than about half of the population.

No that’s the hourly rate. The union wants £15 ph though. I took on a second job for my extra £5k

Name one that did SOMETHING

also, if a business isn’t profitable- who would purchase it?

@Mrsttcno1 without workers actually doing the work, the business will shut. And business have shut in areas where there is a shortage of staff willing to work for low wages.

For a minute I thougth you were a vicar! 😂

The point is that if everyone on minimum wage is getting paid the same as nurses then the nurses will go off to other jobs where there is less stress and the work is easier - and how does that help anyone? You simply can't have people in basic skill level jobs being paid more than those who have invested in training, and who have jobs with a lot of responsibility.

@ForGreyKoala Nurses wages soon rise higher and they have a much better pension and other benefits. So they could leave for a supermarket job, but it would be very short sighted.

I agree with trying to lift people out of poverty, but have you calculated how much £15 an hour actually is?

Even if someone is only working 40 hours a week, that comes out as being more than £31,000 a year, which is an excellent salary.

If you're worried about poverty, your attention should be on people earning about half that.

The post you quoted told you what they did. Honestly, if there were no businesses owned by someone, then what would the people who work for those businesses do to earn a living? Landowners also employ people. You really have a chip on your shoulder about anyone who has more than you have.

A much better pension doesn't help with day to day living at the start of one's career. Nurses really don't earn as much as they should for the job they do and they have a lot of responsibilty. I certainly wouldn't stay in a job like that if I could get more in a less stressful job, where I could forget about it as soon as I finished for the day, no matter what my pension was.

As I said in an earlier post I am all for lifting the minimum wage, but you just can't lift it in one big chunk. People have told you time and time again that if the wage rose by that much then prices also rise so no-one ends up any better off, but you just can't seem to get it.

Have you ever tried recruiting a senior role when you aren't able to pay to the market rate as your bosses are trying to save money? I have and it isn't easy. You can't find the people you want to do the job with thd right experience.
We had to offer the role as a 'development opportunity ' to get someone in on less money than the job was worth. The person was terrible and it was difficult and costly to let them go and replace them. By then, a certain amount of damage to business reputation had occurred.

Some of the most stressful and hard jobs are the lowest paid. Being paid peanuts doesn't mean what you do is not important or valuable. Some of the lowest paid jobs are the most stressful ones. Carers etc.