AIBU to refuse extra hours when most of the pay goes in tax?

[oldFoolMe]

Would you work extra hours if you had to pay 67% tax on it? Thats without additional childcare, or commuting costs.

I think that if you can earn a pretty good salary on part time hours then it is best to stay on part time hours. Better for you and your family and the more people who do it the more high earning jobs there will be. Yes, less tax but ultimately more employed people.

Yes, because I would put it into my pension and pay no tax on it (right now).

Just want to tax us into oblivion to pay for the queer/non-binary/avoidant/“new Scots”, wastes of space. I’m embarrassed now 😡

Yeah but there’s hard work and there’s skilled hard work.

sorry, but literally anyone can clean, sweep the streets, stock the shelves, be “security” at Tesco. And I genuinely don’t mean to offend. But there’s a limited number of people who can carry out surgical procedures, transplant organs, oversee complex chemo/radiotherapy, clip a brain aneurysm etc.

So it’s not so much about hard work, it’s more about the number of people who can carry out such work, and the risk associated with it.

Oh do give over with this ridiculous slave talk. I have great respect for doctors, have frequently said it's not a job I'd want to do, I don't have the stamina for the hours and would hate my mistakes to be life or death.

I would support you in wanting better pay and conditions. It's criminal how the NHS has been destroyed over the years.

Just drop the slave bit. It's not true, you could switch to another lower earning less stressful job if you wanted to.

Except when there aren't the trained/qualified/experienced people to do the work. You assume an infinite supply of workers.

That's not the case. Look at the well known shortage of dentists and doctors leading to long waiting lists and delayed treatments.

Likewise shortage of other professionals such as qualified/experienced engineers, actuaries, etc.

It costs money to educate/train people for the senior professional roles and can take years, if not a decade or two, for the likes of medical consultants. We need people like that to work as much as possible and not "encourage" them to reduce their hours/days by a dysfunctional tax/benefits system.

I've been talking recently to three accountancy practices as I'm retiring and wanting to sell my practice in the next 2/3 years. All three are really struggling with getting qualified/experience accountants recruited, and are advertising widely/using recruitment agencies, and offering a decent remuneration package, but the only applicants aren't the level they need. They all say the same - the 40/50 year old staff are going down to part time by knocking 1 or 2 days off, the 60+ year olds are retiring or going down to just 1 day, and in the middle of all that, they're having to cover maternity leave as accountancy has become a popular profession for women. All three firms want to buy my business but all three want me to work for them rather than retire - they've the staff to do the menial/lower level work, but don't have the "top end" staff so independently they're all offering me the same "package" of me going in to do high level work and "attracting" me by taking off my "low level" clients. If I'd have realised what was on offer, I'd have moved over and done it years ago!!

Badbunny, I agree with you but unfortunately the government (previous ones as well as this one) either doesn't care or doesn't see a problem. The £100 k cliff edge means that loads of people put a lot of money into their pensions. They hit their late 50s, see some contemporaries become ill/drop dead and especially if they have a stressful responsible job think sod this, I'm getting out now.

My DH is like this. He's waiting until DD finishes Uni and he's 60 and then he's finishing. He's well paid but hates his job and all the politics. He and a lot of the people at his level keep hoping they'll be offered a protected conversation but there aren't the people with experience coming through to take their places so the company doesn't want to let them go!

“Over the coming two decades, rising pressures from ageing, defense, and the climate transition will require difficult choices to contain spending growth in a context of constrained revenue-raising capacity. These pressures could raise public spending by about 6 percent of GDP by 2050. Beyond the planned tax ratio increase until 2030, staff analysis suggests that the long-term scope for further revenue increases is becoming limited unless more fundamental tax reforms are envisaged. Thus, the scale of rising spending pressures and limited tax space imply that a growing share of the adjustment will likely need to come from expenditure restraint in the longer term. Deeper expenditure reforms could, for example, entail replacing the triple lock with a policy of indexing the state pension to the cost of living, improving the targeting of social benefits, as well as focusing more on preventative care, and expanding charges in the health system while protecting the vulnerable. A transparent public debate would facilitate a better understanding of the trade-offs, clarify policy priorities, and support durable reforms.”

Three areas are particularly important to boost productivity:

• Improving labor mobility. The UK's productivity problem reflects pronounced spatial disparities, with workers unable to easily move to high-productivity locations, in part due to housing costs. The Planning and Infrastructure Act, changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, the release of grey-belt land, and mandatory housing targets are all steps in the right direction. However, construction activity remains weak, underscoring the need to track implementation closely and assess whether weak outcomes reflect policy lags, design gaps, or other frictions.
• Addressing skills gaps. The UK workforce suffers from significant and long-standing skills gaps. While the authorities’ skills agenda has the right institutional architecture with Skills England, the Growth and Skills Levy, and the Temporary Shortage List—it is operating against a backdrop of a deteriorating tertiary education funding model, decades of underinvestment, and migration restrictions that are further tightening availability of skilled labor. This calls for a significant enhancement of the pace and ambition of domestic upskilling, with a focus on younger people.
• Deepening financing for innovation. A central weakness in the UK innovation ecosystem is that many high‑growth, innovation‑intensive firms struggle to secure sufficient long‑term risk capital. This reflects a lack of scale-up financing, institutional portfolios that are insufficiently oriented toward productive investment, and constrained financing for investment in intangibles. The authorities' measures—including pension fund consolidation, listing and market changes, and the expanded role of public finance institutions to catalyze private investment—target the right frictions, and could be complemented by consolidating these institutions without material disruption to their investment activity to reduce fragmentation and eventually increase the scale of their financing operations.

I mean I guess, what does the IMF know when we have such experts in charge leading the narrative!

Although in principle it would be great to job share, the reality is as others say that there aren’t enough people to do some of the jobs. I had to fight to get part time to reduce hours by half a day a week. And I haven’t had maternity cover for either job, as it wasn’t possible to get someone in and approved to the level where they could do the job.

I understand from my friends in corporate law, finance and medicine that it’s similar. And don’t worry, we are working more than full time hours even on slightly part time, whoever was worried about job loyalty. They make sure they get their hours don’t you worry! But why would we take on more responsibility and more (unpaid) hours and more stress to get so much taxed

The problem is when people go part time due to tax - what actually gets cut from your free hours that you already do for whatever institution you work for - is upskilling/supervising the next generation. Which is precisely what this country needs the most. And hence it is a massive problem in the NHS for example, because unless you have enough supervision hours, you cannot train enough new doctors.

Same in most professions really, not just the NHS. You also have to add in that in a lot of professions, the more senior staff are often WFH at least part of the week, so they're not in the office to help train the younger/trainee staff, meaning it takes longer for the new recruits to hit the ground running and get up to speed for the "bread and butter" work and even longer to gain the years of experience needed to be able to take on the harder/complex work. It's a massive problem and just getting worse. Firms/organisations are going to really have to re think their entire recruitment/training/remuneration procedures to ensure that they have enough senior staff in the future. Even moreso with so many firms saying they're recruiting fewer trainees/graduates due to AI as they don't need as many "bums on seats" to do the lower level drudgery work. You really have to wonder just where the next generation of managers/seniors/consultants in professional firms are going to come from!