Can we stop acting like everyone has an equal capability to become well off?

[DeluluTaylor]

Based on the pension thread but not about OP. All this ‘why do people spend their whole lives on MW’ is so woefully ignorant. Some people don’t have a choice.
Neurodiversity
confidence
childcare availability
institutional racism
learning disabilities
trauma and it’s impact
Lifelong insecure housing
Being able to speak English but not write it
So many, many reasons why it is difficult to climb up the ladder. I’ve never been able to as I don’t have the right skills for management. But the world needs more worker bees than managers!
Who do they think should do these jobs?

I agree with many of your examples and there is a obvious link between poor healthy and poverty.

I dont feel it’s fair however to take the view that everyone in well paying jobs is simply there due to good luck or family connections.
I do feel a large part of my success is due to working and studying very hard.
I was essentially studying and doing exams from 12 to my mid 30s. I made significant sacrifices to do this and missed out on quite a lot in my younger years. Was it worth it, I would say so, others might disagree.

@Girlygal and intelligence in some form, not necessarily academic, plus confidence/ self esteem.

Why is it OK? On whose say-so, yours? You're writing people off with no knowledge of their personal situation.

as I said on the other thread, yes there are reasons why people don't meet their true potential, but those reasons should not be barriers that close their mind to the possibilities.

you never need to discuss your family circumstances in an interview, you're there to discuss your skills and experience.

Not necessarily. I had a large plumbing job. The plumber who came seemed a nice guy, but from our conversations, it was safe to say he wasn’t joining Mensa anytime soon. I paid that guy a truck tonne for the work.

and to the poster upthread....

As for someone not being in MENSA but getting a truck tonne of money, what a narrow-minded and patronising way to describe someone with a highly sought after skill. You're not paying him for the 2 hours he did the job, you're paying him for the decades it took him to learn his craft.

Maybe not the top 5%, but in a few more years, there will be so few plumbers, the ones that are around could be earning loads of money according to the FE college DC attends.
It is one of the courses that is not taken up as much as the others.

What is ‘the pension thread’ referred to in the OP, and whats its relevance to the question re people’s abilities?

I think most would agree not everyone has same abilities and opportunities.

You can be well off if you build a business, but that obviously takes skills not directly related to plumbing. There are both electrician and heating/ plumbing businesses in my town where the owners would be considered "well off" and who started in that trade and then built up the size of the business so they now have 10/12 vans manned by other plumbers/ electricians who don't want to handle the business side and are happy to just be sent to places to do the work. They aim themselves at big residential and commercial jobs and work regionally.

Common sense says that there just aren't the jobs available for everyone to be at the top of the tree. I really don't see why that is so hard to understand. I worked in the public sector, there are far more people doing the jobs where we actually dealt with customers because that's the nature of the job. We were at the bottom of the pyramid, above me I had 2 managers, above them 1,above him the big boss who was responsible for several sections. I could only be promoted if a manager left or was promoted and I was successful in my application for the job. I didn't want to be a manager because it's a completely different job. It's just paper work, reports and strategy . ( most of which comes to nothing because circumstances change). I preferred to be practical and do something tangible.
So, that meant I spent all my working life low down the ladder/pyramid. Which is what many of us do. Had I retrained to do a different job, I would still have preferred to be dealing with customers, so still at the bottom.

Yes you have to be university educated and have a lot of confidence for my job role (which I have). Many people in trade jobs do well too but I’m not good at things like that.

But he’s the exception not the rule? Clearly not everyone will be the exception will they.

We don’t live in a meritocracy - and many, many people struggle with this. Particularly when it comes to admitting their own privilege.

Have I worked very hard - yes. I have had a significant disability since birth. But I also grew up in a fairly economically and socially secure household (lower middle class so money angst was also there - esp. around unexpected bills), my parents valued education, I went to a good state school, and I am white.

I don't completely agree.

I think there is always, undeniably an element of inequality that exists due to no fault of our own. The circumstance of our birth, our family setup and the opportunities afforded to us when we are young. I wasn't born into privilege and neither were any of my friends growing up. We didn't have an excellent or even good education. We often had chaotic home lives and our parents couldn't afford the extra curricular activities that I now fund for my children. Coming from this background it was harder to make it and aspiration was thin on the ground for many. However, importantly, some of us used this to inspire us to make more of ourselves. We literally dragged ourselves up and refused to accept that a future of working MW jobs or being on benefits.

I self taught myself what I needed to get good grades. I worked long hours from a young age to fund 6th form and university. I moved across the country to an area I didn't know anybody for work. I worked jobs I absolutely hated and climbed the ladder. I made huge sacrifices to do this. I was very discerning about romantic partners and simply wouldn't have a child until I was married and owned my own home.

Of course none of this guarantees anything but my point is that I did what I could to push the odds into my favour so that I wasn't going to be a single parent living in a noisy flat. Some of my friends had a much easier time of their late teens and 20s and have ended up in a similar situation to what you describe. Was this their 'fault'? Well if they had started off being more privileged then they wouldn't be in this situation now so of course there is an element of inequality but ultimately I knew them when they chose to doss around at school, take the easy road when it comes to working and they chose questionable partners and rushed to have kids. Now they are in difficult situations and couldn't easily climb the corporate ladder but it's wrong to characterise them as simply being to victims of poor fortune. This attitude is what ingrains intergenerational poverty and a sense of helplessness. The outcome could have been different and they had a lot of control over that.

These people have never actually experienced what life is like for other people. I work with young people who have learning difficulties and are from very very deprived backgrounds and have very difficult home lives and they will inevitably get stuck where they are. Also if you go to a shit school or live in a very deprived area have a very dysfunctional family of course it is going to have an impact. Mumsnet is full of judgemental daily mail readers sadly.

As someone who grew up in poverty and now earns well I can. Tell you it's 100x harder in 100 different ways than remaining well off. You're on the back foot in every way to start off with. I can tell people what I did and the multiple jobs I worked alongside university and the fact I barely slept as I was in uni until 5, a call centre until 10 and studying for a few hours after and I didn't degree that required 30 hours physically in classes and tutorials. Then you graduate and you need to hit the ground running so you work your graduate job in the day and a call centre or bar job at night. You can't go home to supportive parents for the summer after uni and hang about for a bit, you've to get right to having a deposit and moving into a new rented accomodation. When you eventually graduate and you want to buy a house noones gifting deposits and you're paying rent alongsid saving. Every little thing sets you back and .makes it harder and it's always a constant fight.

I'm not saying it's not possible but it's a constant higher level of effort.

I sound resentful but I'm not I'm just aware and I'm very lucky my hard work has paid off at this stage, many work as hard and have worse starts and can never get ahead. And many don't have the advantage of being really academically gifted and so able to get good grades despite the extra pressure and lack of time.

A less capable better off person will usually do better than a more capable person from a background I poverty because of the many many advantages afforded them.

I always have an issue when certain higher paid jobs are equated with inteligellence and other jobs are for those 'not intelligent' mainly because there isn't one measurable intelligence standard. IQ measures analytical, Visual-spatial processing, which is most in line with Academia. It doesn't measure Emotional Intelligence, social/interpersonal, creativity or kinesthetic. It isn't top trumps, and one form of intelligence doesn't rank higher than another..thats a societial assumption, not truth.

Thats probably a trigger rant there, i interpret with phrasing, when people state 'not everyones intelligent' 'not every one can do xyz because of capability' as misleading and inadvertently devaluing members of our society and i think our terminology on that matter needs adjusting as we write off many people without realising.

I started my career later in life due to circumstances, for me it was a lot of hard work but it was also luck. The right employer taking a chance on me, the right employer providing me with access to education that i couldn't access any other way. I have a disabled child, i couldn't afford to work less to study, i couldn't afford to take out a loan, being older i couldn't qualify for many grants or opportunities. But my boss could get me the higher level education through the company.

That was lucky, that was an opportunity many people don't get that and can't access and it does push me out of the minimum wage trap.

But although I would say with the right support anyone is capable, i would also not put down or assume anyone can do that. Not because of capability, but because of well-being being battered. To work, study, with a disabled child. I had all nighters, navigating medical appointments, hospital admissions, whilst studying around it..by year 2 i was ill, physically. Underweight, sleep deprived, undernourished. Because in many circumstances for those who can't access career growth due to poverty/medical/ other legitimate factors. To do so does mean having to push yourself to your limits. It isn't healthy, but for many that is the only way 'out'.
If anyone has chronic conditions, underlying health issues this could have severe repercussions for them, which is why i wouldn't preach 'anyone can do it' as i could inadvertantly do harm, if they feel they have to push to that level whilst medically compromised.

It’s difficult to define success though really because it’s so subjective, do we define it purely by wealth? I’m an academic so I got through 8 years of university education to become a doctor, I feel successful but earn fuck all!

I’ve known enough people in my life who have absolutely no desire to be remotely ‘successful’ or wealthy. I grew up WC on a council estate and lots of folk were simply happy with their low paid job provided it meant they could go to Benidorm once a year and buy booze and fags. That sounds stereotypical but I’m being real. Not sure they’d say they were successful but they were happy enough.

Not everyone wants it and you’re right, some people struggle to achieve it due to various societal barriers. The world also wouldn’t function if people weren’t there to do the bottom rung jobs.

I hate it when the managers at the top look down on the staff they manage as if they are inferior. Our head of department doesn’t have the same technical skills the rest of us do, doesn’t do the same role, but focuses on managing and strategy. Also snaps at us and makes passive aggressive comments. Questions how long it takes us to do the things she can’t do at all.

This.

I think it's completely unrealistic that people on this thread are implying that all humans are intellectually equal or that everyone has 'something they are good at'.
This simply isn't the case and there are lots of and lots of people who work hard at school but the fact remains, they aren't 'good' at anything, and that isn't a personal failing! Too many people on this thread are basically suggesting if people just work hard enough they can rise up when that simply isn't the case. There also just aren't enough highly paid jobs for it to be true either, average salaries in the UK are low and the data is massively skewed by large London salaries. In much of the UK, the vast majority of jobs on offer are minimum wage or perhaps a rung or two above. The reality is that far and away most people earn less than 40k. The issue is with affordability and the state needing to 'top up' minimum wage workers so much for them to be able to afford a basic lifestyle.

I know, this thread is actually quite revolting.

Yanbu. The PassAgg "what are you doing to increase your earnings potential?" really gets on my nerves.

Nothing actually. I can only just about keep my head above water working PT, parenting and dealing with SEN and my own health problems. I had to drop out of Open University when the lack of sleep risked impacting on my actual paid job. Middle age and lack of memory means I usually forget a shopping list, I definitely won't be doing an assessment or exam again.

There is a level of intelligence needed to get and keep a job. I used to teach severely autistic teenagers and if you have a severely autistic teen who cannot read or write and is largely non verbal using assistive technology to communicate then realistically they might possibly get a job with support but they are unlikely to progress.

however the minimum level of intelligence needed to progress is not high. Many jobs need social skills - interacting with the public and with colleagues - much more than they need intelligence.

so - for some people it simply is not possible due to their disabilities. For most people it is possible but there are lots of barriers.

The other issue we have here is that are a lot of jobs are above now but but not significantly and certainly not in a way that is reflective of the difference in qualifications and experience that are needed to get there.

For example, nurses and teachers. We will always need a lot more classroom teachers and ward nurses that there are openings for SLT or matrons. These professions will have been to uni, work incredibly hard, do post graduate cpd etc but they do not have the ability to keep progressing and earning more.

As someone said, you don't get promoted in the NHS. You can apply for higher banded jobs but they are rarely available and often require much more from you for very little increase in pay.

As the NMW has improved, the gap between it and the salary of a band 5 nurse has got a lot smaller.

Some of this is about choice as well. I come from a very impoverished background and experience of most things on your list op. I was determined not to have that experience in adult life, even if it meant making sacrifices. I have made loads. I chose to have children later so I could afford childcare, I stayed in a job I hated for the pension, I worked weekends to get promoted. I had a little bit of luck, I worked very hard and a scarified a LOT. Not everyone would make the same choices, but it’s not only luck and not only hard work. Pretending it is only luck is just as bad as pretending it’s only hard work.

I had a fairly "middle class" upbringing, I have a degree. I also work in a supermarket. There's a multitude of reasons, I don't really care if anyone thinks I'm some kind of failure to be honest. It's not a level playing field by any stretch of the imagination. If your face or personality don't fit then it's nigh on impossible. I'm pretty happy where I am though and I'm fortunate enough to be able to get by without benefits etc. People shouldn't judge, you really don't know anything about the person on the checkout or the person making your coffee.

Of course it isn't only luck. Hard work is absolutely required.

I think the OP's point is that hard work alone isn't enough.

Of course we shouldn't be putting limits on anybody's ambitions. We should be encouraging everyone to strive and be the very best that they can be.

We just have to be honest enough to acknowledge that, for some people, there will be limits to what they can achieve, and a NMW job might be the pinnacle of their achievement. Or in some cases, a NMW might not even be a realistic aspiration.

As a society, we should be helping everyone to reach their full potential while ensuring that everyone has a decent standard of living, recognising that some people will need more support than others.

And we need to be honest that it isn't a level playing field.

OMG. I am nearly fifty and never thought of it in that way. You are so right.