To think raising NMW is a good thing

[Kilot]

The poorest in society will earn more. Companies will have to pay more, benefits will drop.

If companies can't afford to pay the staff a decent wage they shouldn't be in business.

My mum works in one. They’re making redundancies.

I don't know the answer as I see both sides. Wages need to go up for everyone because prices and taxes continue to go up.

But if UK shops, cafes and other businesses go bust then the gap will be filled by Amazon, Costa, etc who use loopholes and don't pay their share of tax into our economy and things will continue to get worse.

Lots of businesses are struggling we have lost many big names over the last decade and many owners earn less than minimum wage to support their staff and retain jobs, especially in retail. NMW does not apply to business owners, self employed or company directors. Not everyone has fat cat shareholders.

School budgets are an entirely different thing. They should be better funded.

19 times in 25 years is pretty good! A lot of employees probably haven’t had 19 increases in this period. Quite a lot of salaries have been frozen year on year. They’d be better off increasing tax thresholds, which results in more money in your pocket, rather than freezing them for years which just pulls more people into paying higher amounts of tax through fiscal drag. Increasing the minimum wage may make the government look good but they aren’t funding it, it’s down to the employer. In fact it’s a win for the government as they will receive more in taxes from ‘ordinary working people’.

Or you could, for example, look at it from the POV of the pub owner. Everything is going up...everything. People have less cash in their pocket so fewer are going out. The publican might have paid for training in hospitality and are repaying loans, as well as business loans. They have taken on a huge amount of financial risk to open the pub, and personal risk too. When it comes to paying for everything, their own wages are the last in a long list of priorities. They have no employers' NI contributions or pension contributions or sick pay or maternity/paternity pay. However the person potwashing and wiping tables gets all those things, and their pay is almost as much as the business owner, or maybe even the same. How does that work from a business perspective? Who is going to take risks in that climate? And then you have people coming in every day and moaning about the prices, if they come in at all.

What about the companies that can afford to pay their staff a decent wage but instead choose not to and just pay their staff NMW?

It's the cost of living and accommodation prices which are the problem. The government can't keep handing that problem over to businesses and expect them to sort it out with ever increasing pay.

I have a client that is suffering terribly already. Increase in NMW, increase in e'er's NI, Brexit causing their parts costs to increase massively, plus they're still recovering from Covid, when they were classed as an "essential" business, so were able to stay open, but their business plummeted, meaning they couldn't justifiably furlough all their staff like other businesses.

Meanwhile, the company's owners haven't paid themselves for the last year, focussing entirely on making sure their employees get their wages first.

A bad budget will force this business to close, and add 13 people back into the unemployment numbers.

Don't be fooled into thinking that all business owners are making a huge amount of money.

Agree with this, I am seriously considering quitting my band 6 job in the nhs, it just isn’t worth the stress, travel, and work that I have to do outside work hours to ensure everyone is safe. A supermarket job and UC credit too up would leave me in a very similar position financially, when travel costs etc are taken off

If they really cared about lower earners they would have increased the personal allowance. This is just a stealth tax grab that will fuel inflation and encourage companies to explore AI.

For each 40 hr a week worker the government gets £9 per week in tax and EE/ER NI and the worker gets £14 a week to give to Tesco when food inflation continues to rise.

It's easy to say businesses that can't afford this aren't viable but that doesn't change the fact that unemployment will increase. The sector I work in is struggling, many businesses have already gone this year. I'm not sure what the future holds.

They should, but they’re not. How many TAs are we happy to be made redundant while that’s still the case?

That old chestnut.

It reminds me of Covid when I was told on MN that if I couldn't afford to close down my business for a few months with no income coming in (this was before the self employment grants were announced) that it deserved to go under and was obviously failing anyway.

So, everybody else should take home more but the business owner should settle for less.......🤔😂 Way to incentivise people to run a business and employ people! 🙄

It's a just and right idea

In reality it won't work.

Employers can't afford it

Wages can’t be raised in a vacuum. They have to underpinned by higher productivity and economic growth.

This is the crucial point that few people grasp. Raising NMW doesn't suddenly magic money out of nowhere.

Absolutely people deserve a decent minimum wage - I strongly believe the real living wage (which is more than NMW) should be paid.

I’m also not thinking of Oxfam etc but small to medium sized charities of which there are many - with a tiny management team who are on low salaries themselves and working over and above the hours they are contracted for.

If these charities are the only ones running a support service for victims of abuse in the area, or the ones offering specialised supported living - and increases mean they have to stop operating or reduce the services they offer, then it isn’t rich shareholders who suffer.

More and more previously government run services are now taken on by charities, I think there should be a differentiation and more government support/allowances for non-profits. Not that it should be used as an excuse to pay people less.

To the poster who told me my business isn’t viable I Suppose you are right. But these business aren’t all Amazon who pay less tax than me. It’s people like me who literally feed our country, look after our kids and old people. If we go you will be left with foreign imports made by people on far less than our minimum wage, in worse conditions for the staff and animals and food safety issues can be really dodgy.

We don’t make millions. We have 6 days food in this country at a push of something goes wrong. Why the fuck aren’t we caring about the fact that we can’t feed, clothe or heat ourselves.

I agree on this. Charities should get an employer's NI tax break.

That way the staff could still earn what they would doing a job in a similar role in a non-profit business, but without costing the charity the full 15% NI on top.

"Millions of profit" 🙄

People who spout shit like this are the ones who have no idea that SMEs make up a huge proportion of a our tax paying private sector workers (about 60%), and about 33% of those are microbusinesses, so sole traders, partnerships etc.

Well they will have to take more from ordinary workers, given that tax revenue is already 7.5 billion less than expected, according to the OBR. Maybe the wealthy and more globally mobile people leaving is starting to have an impact.

Get more skills. Earn more. Why aren’t these options for you?

And what happens with unsustainable businesses?
They cease operating ... and their jobs disappear.

What sum is a liveable wage?
How long is a piece of string? It depends on where you live and the size of your family. You expect the gov't to regulate all the variables?

Money doesn’t grow on trees, so a company that had could afford to employ ten people, may then only be able to afford eight.