Why are today’s salaries so crap?

[IWantToHibernate]

Currently keeping my eye out for other jobs, and it’s surprising how salaries are pretty much the same as they were for the same jobs pre-covid 5-6 years ago. Despite inflation, cost of living rises and the minimum wage going up.

Minimum wage is now almost £24k for a 37.5hr a week job, and yet I’m seeing adverts wanting people with a few years experience, a degree and a host of skills paying not much more than that.

Of course I am not knocking minimum wage jobs, it’s more that the jobs that used to pay a fair bit more than minimum wage have not really increased their salaries despite minimum wage increases.

This is in the south east too, and seems to be an issue more in the private sector.

@TinselTarts You are not connecting wages to profit though. They are completely linked. Many companies cannot make a decent profit and cannot grow the business. This is a major problem. Sadly Labour thinks taxing jobs and taxing individuals more leads to growth. It does the opposite. Add in power prices, business rates, costs associated with just about everything and we have msny companies that are barely surviving. It’s too basic to just mention a few. If you want regular pay reviews, be employed by the state.

This isn’t true, and the hype around AI is way ahead of the technology’s capability. We are increasingly seeing examples of it - faulty legal judgments (costing enormous money in appeals), fake news, dodgy “calculations” and computer code, market research conducted without any actual people leading to terrible product decisions, and so on.

Even Sam Altman has started trying to “manage expectations,” but there are so many billions invested in scaling the problems away by building more data centers (which isn’t working) the entire industry is starting to quietly talk about another dot com bust. Which will also be terrible for standards of living, and make even more people go looking for “free” fake crap on TikTok to distract them from their lives.

And how much is the average house on your street?

Can we be honest with ourselves about the standard of living we want though? Look around you.. nearly every house has a car or 2! Alot of houses with nice next furniture and lovely composite doors... The latest smartphone (although this is decreasing) and lots of expensive skincare/make up products.. lovely branded clothing and nice trips away...

This isn’t reality for many though.

A lot of households have 2 cars because both parents work & have longer commutes &/or adult dc at home.
I’d argue most people’s furniture is Ikea & I have 2nd hand Ikea!

Well I for one now do a job that took 5 people about 20 years ago. AI pretty much does everything for me even now.

editing to add in my current team we are about to let go about 2 roles as we can merge people together as things that used to take lots of time now take a couple of hours

Kindly; you may not have the lifestyle you want, but you are doing better financially than you were as a student

Do you summarise papers for a living and then double check you’ve not actually made any of them up? That’s my favourite use of LLMs.

Yes, I've noticed this trend too, which is totally unfair on workers with many years of experience to offer.
I realise that the government has increased NMW and employers NI but companies and retailers have increased their prices to reflect these increases, so some of these companies are short changing their own staff.
Without more money circulating around the economy, businesses will cease to function and unemployment will increase even more.

It's true to some extent. Look at the accounting world. People simple accounting systems like Xero can load invoices automatically and code them to the right ledgers. In the fairly recent past this was done by people. Now can pay £30 a month for what might have taken a full time role.

That’s not AI, just simple automation. Machine Learning and algorithms have been allowing us to automate all sorts of workflows like that for the past 10+ years.

The “Oh my God all the jobs are going to disappear” doom hasn’t been about automating workflows so fewer people can get more done, it’s been about not needing humans thinking or creating AT ALL because AI could do it better/instantly. That has been wildly overstated, as more and more of the p it puts of the big LLMs have been demonstrating.

I have no doubt we’ll continue to see computer-aided automation but the idea that computers will wipe out all white collar jobs is pure hype from VCs who’ve put way too much money into LLMs.

This has been true all my working life- I have 30 years experience and am self employed, but i struggle to earn £15 an hour.
This is the secret about all the immigration over the years- it is not about giving people a better life, or widening our horizons it's about the constant import of cheaper labour which has caused huge wage suppression.
Why would someone pay me £15 an hour to make them something when a recent immigrant will do it for £7?

I suspect you will be proven wrong in time. But time will tell.

It's really not a secret that immigration has been principally to keep prices down.

Not prices , wages- and keeps the cost of housing high.

I definitely agree people spend more on themselves than they used to.

I know a lot of people who moan about being skint but have their nails and lashes done every few weeks for £100 a pop, new clothes for each event/season, expensive skincare products (thinking back to when £3 Clearasil was seen as the height of skincare sophistication when I was at school!). Clothes and shoes always branded.

Because governments are on the side of big business and don't give a damn.
Labour have done nothing to stop this and will pay for it eventually.
If reform get in, it will be 10x worse. Only an idiot thinks they will do well for Britain.

This. DS had a managerial job when he graduated. He was so exploited, the hours worked out at around £7ph. He left and took on some seasonal work for a tourist company. Better hours, better pay, zero stress. It's ridiculous.

Eh? We actually don't have enough people in this country to do the work that many immigrant do. What work is it you do that people are paying immigrants £7 an hour for?

It's crazy. I work a full time stressful and responsible job in the legal sector and earn the princely sum of £25k 😔I worked out my hourly pay based on a 37.5 hour week, and I'd actually be better off working at Aldi!
Not only that, it's not just my firm or my sector that pays poorly. I've looked for similar roles in other sectors and they all seem to pay much of a muchness.
Even my friend who works in a really senior role at a university events department is only on just over £40k.
Makes me wonder where all these six figure roles are that are so common on Mumsnet!

Suspect based on what? I work in tech and have for 30 years. I spend my time playing with the different models and seeing where I can automate what I do, and I’ve found a very narrow set of functions that require a LOT of manual checking. I’ve been reading the debates between AI researchers like Gary Marshall and Yann LeCunn.

If you’re getting your AI info from Linked In, you’re being lead around by the nose.

It's because wages aren't the same. Minimum wage has increased enormously, which means jobs that used to be quite "good", are now not much above nmw.

By artificially increasing the minimum wage far beyond the UK economies ability so sustain it (productivity wise) they have created a material amount of wage compression with higher-skilled roles that used to pay a lot more than the NMW.

This was a serious economic mistake on the part of the Tories and Labour as it has driven large increases in inflation (food specially) and caused productivity to deteriorate (wage compression causes loss of motivation as you are not able to maintain skill and ecperience based salary differentials, which leads to people becoming less productive at the margins)

The UK is trapped now until the pay differential are allowed to recover. If they keep jacking up the NMW to 67% of the median, the economic situation will not be improving.

salaries have really flattened where I work. I'm temporarily up 2 points which takes me into the middle of the next grade. 50 £ a month. I'm not impressed

I agree, this situation has made many of us poorer and reduced wealth to the point where we are struggling to pay for our public services in this country.
I feel that this country has gone backwards during the last 20 years 🙄

This has also been used to keep inflation very low, although this mechanism doesn't work so well now because of food price increases and the astronomic cost of Net Zero.