Of course I understand that, don’t be so aggressive. I still think 19.5k with no specific qualifications is not unreasonable.

Of course I understand that, don’t be so aggressive. I still think 19.5k with no specific qualifications is not unreasonable.

p.s. doctors are ‘in training’ for about 10 years post qualification – we are seeing patients and prescribing drugs and the NHS couldn’t function without us, so to say that you would be chuffed to earn that whilst you were ‘in training’ shows little understanding of whats going on.

And you couldn’t function without the nurses/midwives telling you what to look for and prescribe.

Of course I understand that, don’t be so aggressive.

You were the one who said I had no understanding of what was going on, I just passed your statement back.

Brief summary then..

So the general concensus is that 19k is crap..
The facts are that for millions of people 19k is very acceptable..

There also seems to be a vibe that these folk that survive in the 12 – 20k salary bracket have in some way brought it on themselves and should fight for more..?

There was also briefly a mention from one poster that no-one from STW could survive on 19k

ok.. so now can we finally lay to rest the myth that STW is full of working class heroes bravely soldiering on..
have we finally realised that the working class work hand to mouth with no time or money for luxuries.. they literally live to put bread on the table.. same as they always have and always will..
and that once you climb out of that trap you are middle class..?

never mind all this crap about ‘my grandad was a miner so I’m working class’
or.. ‘I work a 40 hour week for my 32k and holiday and sick pay.. the fact that I work makes me working class..’

once you have realised that many of the youths in this country have only this future to motivate them away from a life of crime.. it’s easy to see why they have no respect for the middle class majority that are encouraging them to live within the law..

It is a crap job, even if you’re experienced (i was) there are many better paying driving jobs out there with far better hours. Rural roads, especially around holiday times are a nightmare – I know this my route was mainly rural roads

so you couldn’t hack it. some people can. i did/can/would.

You still didnt say how many vans you had to make £40k/yr.

one.

This £400 pw is that after all expenses? Wondering how Devon compares to London. What sort of hours would you need to do to earn that. Is work contract or ad hoc?

We continually recruit drivers and have a pretty big churn rate. Recruiting drivers is not a problem, recruiting good drivers is the problem. Our top drivers probably clear £800 per week whereas drivers at the bottom end who work short days and take the odd day off sometimes end up making a loss on the week.

yunki – Member

Brief summary then..

So the general concensus is that 19k is crap..
The facts are that for millions of people 19k is very acceptable..

There also seems to be a vibe that these folk that survive in the 12 – 20k salary bracket have in some way brought it on themselves and should fight for more..?

There was also briefly a mention from one poster that no-one from STW could survive on 19k

ok.. so now can we finally lay to rest the myth that STW is full of working class heroes bravely soldiering on..
have we finally realised that the working class work hand to mouth with no time or money for luxuries.. they literally live to put bread on the table.. same as they always have and always will..
and that once you climb out of that trap you are middle class..?

never mind all this crap about ‘my grandad was a miner so I’m working class’
or.. ‘I work a 40 hour week for my 32k and holiday and sick pay.. the fact that I work makes me working class..’

once you have realised that many of the youths in this country have only this future to motivate them away from a life of crime.. it’s easy to see why they have no respect for the middle class majority that are encouraging them to live within the law..

Yunki I think you have pretty much, in a longhand way, said what I said.
I know lots of people live on 19k. I don’t think they should have to, and there is little room for luxury.
I do not think anyone brought it upon themselves, as I mentioned before I reaped the benefit of education through supportive family, friends and community, both moral and financial. Not everyone has access to this.

So the general concensus is that 19k is crap..

I don’t think that’s the general census at all – toys thinks it is but he is not based in the real world and just likes to pontificate (I’d bet lots he’ll post again here as he can’t stand not having the last word) so the number of posts with that opinion maybe high but the number of posters is not.

And can we stop thinking in delineated working/middle/upper classes please – the reality is far more complicated with much greyer lines.

I hope the op can sort out his advert/ recruitment process and get someone for the job as that sounds like the issue not in the income.

I lived and worked in tavistock (mid devon) in the early/mid 90’s and earned 2.75 an hour 396 per month take home making wetsuits in a factory in Lewdown (late teens, early 20’s) I ran a car, rented a room etc, I could read a map, drive a car/7.5 ton truck etc. I’d of bit my tight arm off to double my salary (taking into account inflation)

My point is – as an expat. is life that easy in Devon now that one can cruise into a job that i would killed for in those days or have we come to expect more from life?

Oh, and i only had 4 channels on me TV too, if that’s any help.

I hope the op can sort out his advert/ recruitment process and get someone for the job as that sounds like the issue not in the income.

thanks convert, i hope so too. interviewing someone at 10.30.

….so ‘ unskilled ‘ workers only deserve low pay?
That seems the fact that gets repeated here.

Regardless of how hard they work. Regardless if its back breaking work. If they were not lucky enough to be in the position to afford to go to university – then they deserve low paid work.

I ‘m obviously in the minority then. Because i think a hard days work deserves a decent wage. There are plenty of jobs deemed as unskilled that ‘ highly skilled ‘ proffesionals would not be physically able to do.

With access to university being more biased to the rich/well off. Things are only going to get worse.

“drive a car/7.5 ton truck etc”

Not these days of course. I am wondering when all the post 97 licenses start to catch up with industry.

tm, could it be the time of year? all those tourists on the road means it could take hours extra to get around…

best of luck anyway..

mooman – Member

….so ‘ unskilled ‘ workers only deserve low pay?
That seems the fact that gets repeated here.

Regardless of how hard they work. Regardless if its back breaking work. If they were not lucky enough to be in the position to afford to go to university – then they deserve low paid work.

I ‘m obviously in the minority then. Because i think a hard days work deserves a decent wage. There are plenty of jobs deemed as unskilled that ‘ highly skilled ‘ proffesionals would not be physically able to do.

With access to university being more biased to the rich/well off. Things are only going to get worse.

I agree. It’s particularly galling that the bin man who has to lift and stink all day gets paid not much when a head teacher who fiddles around with bits of paper and phone calls all day gets an awful lot.

ta fb.

it does take longer in the summer. it takes longer to do everything in the summer = go shopping, get home etc, etc. that gets offset in the rest of the year when the roads are empty.

With access to university being more biased to the rich/well off. Things are only going to get worse.

There’s a can of worm! Look what happened when any Tom, Dick or Harry could get a loan for a University course. Pointless courses in this that and the other funded for 3 years to do f all.

If my uni course was funded by my folks i would of made damn sure that i didn’t let them down and made sure that it counted. I’m not so sure that it’s a bad thing. I say this having picked up a large bill myself for doing a shite course that amounted to jack.

The really bright will still get sponsored and funded, the cream (and rich, more than likely) will rise to the top and we will be left with a large % of the population that will accept 19.5k as a decent enough wage as they don’t have a degree in textiles or media studies rather than say ‘stuff it’ and leave it for someone else, maybe someone from another country that actually thinks, ‘hey that’s not so bad’

dunno, that’s just what i think. Being from Devon.

I agree. It’s particularly galling that the bin man who has to lift and stink all day gets paid not much when a head teacher who fiddles around with bits of paper and phone calls all day gets an awful lot.

In many ways I agree too. However, I also recognise that many more people can do a bin man’s job than can (effectively) do a head teacher’s job so the pay doesn’t only reflect the immediate difficulty of the job but also the availability of those skills. Of course, you need to make sure that if you’re paying someone more for their skills because they’re not widely available that they are actually effective at their job but that’s a whole different discussion.

FWIW, my first grad trainee job (in IT, what else 🙂 ) was £16.5k, living in London – that was quite a stretch but it’s doable.

I don’t think that’s the general census at all – toys thinks it is but he is not based in the real world and just likes to pontificate (I’d bet lots he’ll post again here as he can’t stand not having the last word)

nice childish /gentle ad hominem attack on the person rather than his position or argument. Topped off with a lovely way of being able to go nah nah na nah nah at him playground style if he replies 🙄

And can we stop thinking in delineated working/middle/upper classes please – the reality is far more complicated with much greyer lines.

TBH I have seen very little of this class debate on here but where exactly in your blurry system are you placing an unskilled worker with below average earnings…can I take a guess at this one?
EDIT: clubber I get the economic argument that someone who does one job and someone doing another get vastly different salaries I just dont understand the moral argument for this. This leaves us in a position where it will be increasingly difficult to fill essential , but very low paid jobs. People will not be able to afford to live in the area to do the shitty jobs for much richer people such as refuse collection.

In many ways I agree too. However, I also recognise that many more people can do a bin man’s job than can (effectively) do a head teacher’s job so the pay doesn’t only reflect the immediate difficulty of the job but also the availability of those skills. Of course, you need to make sure that if you’re paying someone more for their skills because they’re not widely available that they are actually effective at their job but that’s a whole different discussion.

FWIW, my first grad trainee job (in IT, what else ) was £16.5k, living in London – that was quite a stretch but it’s doable.

Clubber, I don’t have a simple solution unfortunately, but what I know is that the higher up the scale you are the more likely you are to agree to your peers pay rises and to push down on those below you.

My first graduate wage in 1995 was 13k a year. I though it was a fortune, until after a year living on it, I realised it wasn’t much.

….so the ethic that hard work pays, is really a myth then?

Does a teacher go home with aching muscles from hard graft?
Do people really believe that all low payed unskilled workers are not as clever as skilled/highly skilled workers?

There are alot of unskilled jobs that actually require lots of skill to perform. Maybe physical skills than mental … but then again, does a mentally demanding job deserve more than a physically demanding job?
If so – then why?

TBH I have seen very little of this class debate on here but where exactly in your blurry system are you placing an unskilled worker with below average earnings…can I take a guess at this one?

Thankfully little class debate on this one – was responding to the poster of the quote.

If you want to talk class, the unskilled worker earning below average – that maybe be thought of by many as working class. What about a college of mine, started in catering now in his mid 50’s he is a catering manager running a team of 20 or 30. If you asked him what he was he’d say working class; if a lot of people met him (snobs mostly) they might pigeon hole him as working class because of his liking for tatoos and propping up the bar but he earns more than any teacher at the school (deservedly imo). Then there is the electrician who might well call himself himself working class too but also earns more than nearly all the “middle class” teaching staff. Then there is a sculptor I have come in from time to time who sounds about as far back and plumy as anyone I have met (so you might label upper class), works his ass off, yet lives on way below minimum wage averaged out over a year with no other income stream or inheritance. Income and “class” do not always have corollary making “class” the term pretty “grey” or meaningless. I’ve just finished reading Bill Brysons “At Home” – it’s quite eye opening about the history of the class system, incomes and living conditions in past times and not always what our preconception might imagine.

….so the ethic that hard work pays, is really a myth then?

It depends what you class as hard work I guess. Hard work as in working your hardest at whatever job you do is likely to pay off. Thats not that same as just doing a job which is physically hard.

Without wanting to sound like people doing “unskilled” hard graft shouldnt be paid well.

….so the ethic that hard work pays, is really a myth then?

‘hard work’ shouldn’t be defined purely by calories burned during the working day.

Well one of my mates who emigrated to OZ said that its a ” working mans country” as in trades and manual labour were given more respect and pay than in the UK.

I dunno if its true, but conjecture would be that they are classless.. I am also deluded to think that it’s a similar position in france, where they had a revolution and got rid of the ruling class.

As JY said before the “work ethic” is a victorian construct to get the plebs to grind away for a “living wage” . I don’t belive in riot or revolution I belive in doing what I think is right and changing things from the inside, hence my attitude to employees.

Well one of my mates who emigrated to OZ said that its a ” working mans country” as in trades and manual labour were given more respect and pay than in the UK.

I had a mate who went to Australia and said it was piss easy for a Brit to get work because the Australians were lazy.

EDIT: clubber I get the economic argument that someone who does one job and someone doing another get vastly different salaries I just dont understand the moral argument for this. This leaves us in a position where it will be increasingly difficult to fill essential , but very low paid jobs. People will not be able to afford to live in the area to do the shitty jobs for much richer people such as refuse collection.

True enough – already happens in London but then supply/demand will work that out – in theory at least…

Moral argument – yep, I get what you mean (they both should go home having put in similar overall effort (mental and/or physical) but imo supply/demand seems to be ingrained in humans and I can’t see that changing.

Clubber, I don’t have a simple solution unfortunately, but what I know is that the higher up the scale you are the more likely you are to agree to your peers pay rises and to push down on those below you.

Disconnection from people isn’t it – it’s much easier to make a decision to lay off/reduce the pay of people if you don’t have to talk to them/look them in the eye everyday.

I had a mate who went to Australia and said it was piss easy for a Brit to get work because the Australians were lazy.

I had a mate who said the same. At the start. After a while he said he understood it more and that Aussie’s just weren’t so interested in careers and so they were less willing to put the effort in. Or to put it another way, they’re very interested in sport and put huge effort into that…

In many ways I think that they have a far healtier perspective on it…

in australia you “work to live”. in germany you “live to work”. i think that the UK is some sort of halfway house between the two schools of thought.

i would be labelled working class due to my job (and perhaps appearence) as a carpenter, but was easily earning over £35k/annum in the uk. in germany i was earning €19.2k/annum doing the same job, but with longer hours and more graft per hour. i earn more as a bike guide than i would as a carpenter….

in germany class exists much more than it does in the UK. in australia it is almost non-existant. i like australia.

£19.5k for adrivers job isn’t bad, IMO. i’ve worked for less. it is more than many people earn (i’m thinking of site labourers who graft for ~£250-£350/week).

but money isn’t everything. judge a man not by what he earns but by how content he without the superfluous things that consumerism offers.

i value my time more than i do my money, but of course having money helps me enjoy my time….

work gets in the way of living.

in germany class exists much more than it does in the UK

there is no way that is true we have their royalty 😉

in australia you “work to live”. in germany you “live to work”. i think that the UK is some sort of halfway house between the two schools of thought.

I would completely disagree with that, I have been in Germany for three years now and find that the work life balance is much better than the UK. Working regulations and reasonable unions have lifted much of the fears I have about my future that existed in the UK. My working day ends when it should and I am not expected to be sat at my desk an extra 10 – 20 hours a week in some sort of silly competition to prove worth with my colleagues. Generally companies still invest in and train staff, because the cost of cutting experienced staff is higher.

The building trade may be different, but I would say it is probably more stable in Germany.

mmmm….

i was self-employed in the UK and working from 8 till 4. i had lots of free time. i could go ride or kiteboarding pretty much each evening if i wished. i was paying less tax, insurance and rent and as such didn’t have to put in so many hours to cover my arse. in fact i had lots of surplus cash at the end of each week/month and was wise enough (IMO) to have saved/invested it.

there was no chance of me being a self-employed chippy in germany as i hadn’t been to Meister school. as such i was employed and working 7 till 6. with my €1600/month i was barely breaking even. 30% tax plus insurances, silly expensive rent and i was left with enough to buy basics and a few beers.

and the wages for the other guys who had been there longer were only a few hundred euros more than mine with little to no chance of it improving. and supposedly the firm paid more than most in the area.

more stable is a funny one. in the UK when i didn’t have any work i would go away for a few days and go kiteboarding on the coast somewhere. in germany i wasn’t paid any overtime. my overtime was given back to me when a job was called off due to rain or snow and i was usually informed of there being no work on the day so that day was essentially wasted as far as my free time was concerned.

there was no investment in people as such other than an apprenticeship. if after the apprenticeship you want to be self-employed then you’ll have to go to another school to be come a Meister (master). this’ll cost you ~€40k and take up two-three years to complete. you’ll not be earning whilst going to school (it’s a full-time thing) and you’ll be paying for it yourself. after this you can open your own business. no firm is going to pay for one of its workers to do this as it means they’ll then be competition for the firm.

maybe it is different for a sit-down office job.

my experience is that in germany people are more concerned about their work and career, what people do for work and ultimately how much each is earning. this goes for all jobs. often the discussion at the dinner table amongst friends and the GF’s family will be about wages. some kind of wierd point scoring.

i’ve had odd reactions from the GF’s friends when i’ve told them what i do/did. often i’ve been told that chippying isn’t a proper job (her father told me this, regardless of the fact that with my ‘not proper’ job i was supporting his daughter and taking her on several holiday/trips a year (best of all was when i paid for our flights to visit her folks and this ‘not proper’ job discussion came up again)).

EDIT: where are you in De?

suprise suprise, my 10.30 didn’t show. when i phoned him at 10.45 to see if he was having difficulty finding us, he said that he was tied up and would be in touch. nice of him to let me know.

this is a guy who yesterday told me that he was really keen to come for an interview. he owned his own van and would have been in line to break over 400.

inbetween 4.00pm yesterday and 10.30 today he obviously got offered something better. in fact i dare say that he’s been turning offers down left, right and centre.

he owned his own van and would have been in line to break over 400.

hang you you said 375-400 a week, if you own your own van you clear 400, so it costs between £0-£25 a week to run your own van???

During my twenties, I worked as a multidrop driver – first for a local company, then through an agency, and finally for Parcel Farce.

I would have killed to get a nice, rural route, meandering about through the NE Scottish countryside – these routes were given to the oldest, most time served guys.

My routes were almost always serving the needs of the huge, sprawling, grim industrial estates which serve the needs of the oil businesses, and sometimes the dreary, endless grey sattelite commuter towns around Aberdeen.

Yes, it is hard work and all three companies I worked for regularly took the p1ss – sending you out to a residential address with a washing machine, single-manned, sending you out with a pallet of chains and gear to tiny workshops with no forky, etc, etc….

That said, you’re (kind of) your own boss for most of the day, you can stick on Radio 4 and sit in a layby with a view for the afternoon play, eating your lunch and if I’d been anything close to the equivalent of £20K, I’d probably still be doing it!! As it is, I’m self employed and pay myself less than £20K a year. Hmmm.

nbetween 4.00pm yesterday and 10.30 today he obviously got offered something better. in fact i dare say that he’s been turning offers down left, right and centre.

PAY MORE then 🙄

hang you you said 375-400 a week, if you own your own van you clear 400, so it costs between £0-£25 a week to run your own van???

god you’ve really got the horn over this haven’t you ? are you planning on sticking round long enough to try and catch me out on every detail ?

just this one time, i’ll explain for you.

if someone has their own van, i’d expect that it’s because they figure that its a cheaper way of doing things than renting.

however, i don’t see what this has to do with anything as i was about to offer him a round that he could make 400 on by renting from us.

i’m just going to ignore your posts from now on because frankly you’re not really adding anything and i find your ill informed analysis of the situation and the inference that i’m only interested in ripping people off, to be quite insultuing.

I still don’t really see the issue some have with 19k, that still buys a decent standard of living. Sure you probably won’t be having many holidays abroad or a fleet of carbon bikes but you can do more than just get by. Pay everyone on low wages double and you’ll just trigger inflation and they’ll end up paying twice as much for everything so are no better off.

Whilst I’m in IT and on a decent wage I finished my first IT job after 3 years still on £9k a year (mid-1990’s not 60’s before you ask :p ), it was a crap wage and I had to live with my parents but it got me experience and was well worth it the end. The first year I worked there was as a trainee on a government scheme whereby I got another £10 on top of income support for working a 40 hour week (vs sitting on my arse), a lot of people these days would be too short-sighted to do the same and would be up in arms about being exploited etc. pfft

some people have an issue with 19k because they have no idea of the realities of working wages for working people – beyond what they read in their broadsheets.