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?

No because lower reversed will loose that extra in tax etc.
Raise the threshold instead

Is that your basic pay though? Don't nurses get all manner of pay enhancements for unsociable hours etc etc, sick pay, goldplated pension?
Also nurses are more generally respected than retail staff, and have the potential to earn a lot more as their career progresses

Tesco annual profit £2.3 billion!

Look at the responsibility of say nursery workers, or care workers, particularly in homecare who are working unsupervised

Yes and No. If companies are forced to put wages up then they will only pass the costs onto consumers so items in the supermarket (for example) will get more expensive.

Best just to get a job which pays above NMW/Living wage and then you’re out of that and will have more money.

I'm a childminder- my income is determined by pitifully low government funding from which I am then expected to fund my own lifestyle and equipment and activities to enrich the care of the children I have.
If NMW goes up would you expect me to keep my fees at the same low rate so more spare cash goes into your pocket?? Just curious of course.

And TAs

As a TA I work the closest out of all staff with the children who have the most SEN, behaviour challenges and MH needs. I am left to deliver EHCPs, adapt lessons and the safety of children in a lot of need. I am the closest in line as regards the most challenging behaviour. The work I do enables classes to get on with their lessons without disruption.

I have a degree and several years teaching experience of my own yet I am paid less than those who work in Lidl.

And if we all up sticks to better paid jobs there will be nobody to do the much needed job that I do. The vacancy will still be there and all children will suffer if it isn’t filled.

This has been super interesting.

Feels like lots of people think “some people just need to be badly paid/ poor” (“as long as it’s not me!”)

Im interested to know, of all the posters who say NMW shouldn’t be raised (and presumably believe that the state shouldn’t be topping up salaries with UC)- are you prepared to pay increased tax as a middle or high income earner, so that the poorest paid can have access to the best state provided housing, health and social care, education, public leisure facilities, libraries, parks, and so on, possible, and that they deserve?

This is surely the only possible compensation for these people who are taking those jobs that nobody else wants, that are keeping them trapped in a cycle of poverty, and that ultimately are leaving them with no opportunity to build assets and generational wealth, surely?

I don’t think anybody wants people to be badly paid but the answer to reduce poverty is not a simple ‘put up minimum wage’.

Using the Tesco example, while the profit looks enormous, it’s only about a 2.5% net profit on its turnover. If it increased the pay to the vast majority of its workers without passing on the costs then it goes bust.

Companies also have to make enough profit to have sufficient cash flow to pay wages, taxes, utilities and suppliers etc as well as invest in maintenance of their buildings and equipment. Tesco are not just sat on piles of cash and running their hands together.

@ageratum1 not all nurses work in hospitals doing night shifts! A nurse administering say chemotherapy should earn the same as someone on the til in B&M? Level of knowledge and responsibility are no where near the same are they?

And no - you don't get all sorts of enhancements and benefits. And yes the 1995 pension scheme was good - the 2015 not so good, many private pensions are now better as are teachers, police etc

So £46 million in profit and 333,000 staff in total

Sure - so are you in favour of extending universal credit? Introducing universal basic income? Increasing tax on middle and high income earners to improve public services, with a focus on the needs of working class/lower income families?

Or would you pull levers such as capping private rental housing costs (rent control)? Or would you reduce the cost of living for the poorest by govt subsidizing or even just capping food and energy costs (tax burden will have to increase to pay for it sure, but putting money in the pockets of already wealthy preferred company shareholders, rather than the working poor, has to be paid for somehow, right)? (We saw how well that worked with the energy crisis)?

Because from where I’m sitting (as a middle income earner), something needs to change to help those least financially secure in our country. But it sounds like nobody (and I’m not singling you out - I am talking about posters on this thread in general- nobody wants to make any of the sacrifices necessary to pay for it…

which leads me back to my first point on page 2- which was that as far as middle class MN goes, the working poor can rot, for all they care. (Again not pointing a finger at this poster. Their post just initially precipitated this observation).

It should be £15 per hour. I’m sick of tax take subsiding in work benefits whilst big corporates pay staff too little to live on and if the workers are lucky, the state tops them up. I’m looking at you McDonalds. And just look at the profit they make and the dividends they pay.

I run a small business and would struggle to increase wages but I support a higher minimum wage because above anything else the system is horribly biased against lower earners. They are stuck and it is very unfair. I'd rather be set if a society that is less brutal and less comfortable turning a blind eye to the realities of the system because the status quo suits them personally.

@Mrsttcno1

That’s simple and here’s an example:

Tesco’s

1 CEO
320,000 employees (roughly)

Lets say 250,000 of those are on NMW. You raise NMW to £15, so a £3 per hour increase.

250,000 people earning £3 more per hour, for 8 hour shifts, 5 days a week = £30,000,000

That’s £30 million more for 1 year. The CEO would need a hell of a pay rise to match that.

No, £30m is what it would cost per WEEK, not per year.

Ah yes my maths was off, even more so you can see the issue then when you’re talking about those figures. It’s certainly not as simple as “raise the NNW”.

Agree. It would lead to one helluva rise in Tesco's prices. And you'd be back to square one. Actually you'd be in a worse off situation, because those who are earning above NMW would demand pay rises to maintain that gap, and in most cases would be told by their employer to FRO.

Explain why, when the profit is £46m the prices would be the only solution

Supermarkets are cutting staff all the time and pocketing the savings.

£46m? Sorry where did you get that figure from?

If we're still talking about Tesco, fag packet estimate would be £1bn extra p.a. in wages. You don't think that would lead to price increases?

I don't think it's just CEOs though. It also applies to senior management in a lot of places. They pay an admin assistant or a warehouse worker 23k while paying a senior manager £140k.

Of course there should be a higher salary for those in more senior positions, but the difference is too large.

Further up the thread, it was stated the profit would be 2.5% if there turnover

that would be £46m

and with 300,000 staff you think annual expenses of a billion would be needed for a pay increase

I meant more generally that the lowest paid members of staff should be able to afford to live on their wages before companies start paying out to shareholders.

This would be a set amount nationally, not determined on an individual basis. Some people, in specific sets of circumstances, may still need to claim certain benefits, but that would be open to debate.

@MikeRafone

and with 300,000 staff you think annual expenses of a billion would be needed for a pay increase

Well it would be wouldn't it? Assuming 250,000 are on NMW working on average 25 hours pw, you ain't far off £1bn if you raise NMW by £3 ph.

To pay for that they would need to raise prices massively - then bankrupt themselves through loss of market share