We are too used to getting stuff cheap on the back of poorly paid labour
When the national minimum wage ws brought in ( and the WTD) security industry was up in arms as they are notoriously poor [pay and conditions. But one enlightened boss pointed out that he wanted to pay good wages but obviously this increasing his costs meant he was outbid on contracts. Once everyone was forced to pay a minimum and to give better T&Cs the chap who paid his employees well was again viable and was not outbid on contracts
I find it actually a bit distressing how many so called lefties on here think low wages are acceptable
Increase the minimum wage. Don't blame immigrants.
What is the ‘proper’ level of pay? How is that determined?
For top end jobs " we have to pay what the market needs" so Harding gets a billion pounds for five minutes work. But at the bottom end somehow this does not work
If you increase minimum wage then all other costs go up so relatively there's no change?
There is also a lack of affordable housing in the Lake District (just like the rest of the country) which would make lower paid jobs more appealing, but for some reason this doesn't exist.....
Basically the whole systems up the spout
I find it actually a bit distressing how many so called lefties on here think low wages are acceptable
Nobody - lefty or otherwise - is saying that. Quite the opposite. We're saying that this is a considerably more complex issue than simply rates of pay. There are multiple factors in play here, and 'put the wages up to 20 quid an hour' is not going to provide a workable solution.
The fact is that there are millions of people who have left this country in the last few years. Certain areas have essentially been depopulated. This is a complex problem with no easy answers and to get back on topic, its been caused completely unnecessarily because of the act of gross stupidity that is Brexit
I personally think the minimum wage should be the genuine 'living wage', ie: one you can actually live on, but that in itself isn't going to magic up loads of people who presently don't exist, or do exist, but in Poland
Increase the minimum wage. Don’t blame immigrants.
100%
So you are saying low wages are acceptable, market forces do not work in menial jobs. A real tory attitude Binners
Of course there are other factors but it comes down to one thing. We are too used to getting products and services cheap on the back of poverty wages
Wages in agriculture and hospitality need increasing. A good starting point would be paying young people a proper wage, the minimum wage for the youngest workers is set at a level that assumes they are living at home, it's far too low. But this won't fill the gaps in the work force caused by telling EU workers to do one.
So you are saying low wages are acceptable, market forces do not work in menial jobs. A real tory attitude Binners
Read my last post. I'm not saying that at all
binners
Full MemberThe Lake District is exactly the same. Its now approaching peak season and theres businesses still shut because they can’t get enough staff to open
Yay for Brexit!
I was in Bowness-on-Windermere on the day of the referendum- heard a pub landlady crowing about "sending them all home", in front of the european staff she didn't even seem to realise she was talking about.
The average house price in Bowness is £420000 and the average rent for a 1 bedroom flat is £715 so obviously getting people to move there to do low paying work is going to be really easy.
But the short/medium term problem isn't caused by low pay- at least, not right now, it was built largely on costcutting but that doesn't mean you can reverse it by stopping. And it can't be cured with more pay. We have an economy that worked one way and now via a referendum and a single government term we've decided to destroy some of the things that made it possible for it to work that way. There isn't a miracle cure- we can't magic up 60000 truck drivers, or hospitality staff into places that have been turned entirely into places for other people to visit not for workers to live. These are decisions that have been made over generations. Things were semi-sustainable but fragile, like so many things in the complicated interlinked modern world.
Scotroutes picks up a further problem that even if we could magic the jobs back to how they were pre-brexit, some of the other requirements are already changing, because of course as soon as migratory staff stop coming, the networks to make them work- accomodation etc- also started to look for alternatives.
If you're expecting this post to end with a fix or recommendation, sorry. We broke large parts of our own economy and replacing those parts is going to be hard, where it's possible. And at this point it's getting worse not better.
So you are saying low wages are acceptable, market forces do not work in menial jobs. A real tory attitude Binners
Sorry TJ, I can’t see how you reached that conclusion from the post you responded too.
Binners edited it after my post adding more detail which changes the emphasis
I've not posted anything that suggests I think low pay is good. Quite the reverse.
I'm merely saying that there are no quick fixes to this. Pay everyone 20 quid an hour is not a solution.
Northwind has summed it up perfectly.
We've effectively placed economic sanctions on ourselves which are going to force a total restructuring of large sectors of our economy. Totally unnecessarily and without any plan as to how to go about that
Its ****ing madness!!
We’ve effectively placed economic sanctions on ourselves which are going to force a total restructuring of large sectors of our economy.
At least Dazh is looking forward to the "total restructuring"... I admit to being slightly concerned about who will be in charge of that process though... perhaps I don't trust the "hungry pythons" of Britannia Unchained fame, that are now in a position to be setting our rules and regulations, as much as some people do.
At £20 an hour a typical cafe’s wage bill would be over 70% of turnover.
Where did I blame them? I didn’t
You might not have meant to but your post was poorly worded and it looked like it
Simply raising low workers pay isn't going to help, that's just going to drive inflation. Economic management and a form of wealth redistribution is essential. If you raise everyone's pay whilst there is a housing shortage, what's going to happen? Landlords will just raise prices and help themselves to that extra cash whilst we still have to pay it for the services so that it can be paid to the workers. So you need rent controls.
It's a complicated issue.
At £20 an hour a typical cafe’s wage bill would be over 70% of turnover.
Yes and at that point it might become unattractive to run a cafe. That said, the owners might branch out into something more economically productive? Hard to predict, I'm not an economist. Maybe we need to promote other businesses in those areas e.g. with remote working. Maybe people run cafes because they want to live in the lakes? How about you can live there and work in a software agency instead? Then again, if the software engineers are now competing with the rich 2nd home owners for houses that might drive prices up even more for local labourers. Tricky.
Yes and at that point it might become unattractive to run a cafe
Stock will be 25% to 35%, rent, rates, insurance, power, equipment costs, equipment maintenance.
To make money you need the wage bill 33% at the absolute maximum.
As said above there’s a threshold at what customers are willing to pay.
Tricky.
With knobs on.
We’ve effectively placed economic sanctions on ourselves which are going to force a total restructuring of large sectors of our economy. Totally unnecessarily and without any plan as to how to go about that
Its ****ing madness!!
This.
Recruiting for a job in my team at the moment - it's quite a specific SME role with a very limited cohort (very technical and needs someone who's properly 'time-served'). Well paid, approx. 3-4x average pay.
Brexit has just reduced the size of the cohort, and it was tiny already.
yerp, many of my other tech startup pals are relocating dev to Porto / Berlin for much the same reasons. The money side of the business' staying in London mind so JRM would probably call it a success.
Has daz finally lost it?
Looks like it after the previous couple of pages.
Honestly, they’re living in a world of their own.
They'd like to, that's for sure.
'Other' people should only be allowed 'in' to serve them and their ilk. Then they should doff their cap and politely **** off again.
And of course 'we' should be allowed to go to 'foreign', treat it like a vomitarium, expect everyone to speak English, bow and scrape etc.
It's a fantasy. Enjoy all the benefits of foreign labour, but hate foreigners and the very notion of 'foreign'. Unless it is on 'our' terms.
We are a nation of (largely) knuckledragging philistines.
🇬🇧💩🇬🇧💩
I find it actually a bit distressing how many so called lefties on here think low wages are acceptable
Quite. And then they dress up their support for slave wages by claiming it's some sort of internationalist utopia where young europeans can escape the hell-hole of their home countries by being paid minimum wage over here. It's bollocks. If you want hospitality businesses in the Lake District and similar places to survive then pay what it costs for them to pay people properly.
I didn’t think you were quite that economically illiterate dazh.
I'm talking about voluntarily slashing the available labour force who are willing/forced to work for crap pay overnight. They seem to have assumed that there is a massive pool of desperate unemployed people who will step into the jobs vacated by foreigners. The trouble is that in the places where the jobs are there are no locals available to work, because thanks to property price inflation fuelled by the industry which employed these low paid foreign workers, they were all forced to leave.
It's not slave labour so stop repeating that bollocks.
Your vision sees domestic tourism destroyed, leaving folk to either go abroad or just never have a holiday. Making a job year round just because you want to eradicate season work just has someone sitting on their arse most of the year (or more likely the business will close as some do here) since nobody wants to visit Largs for 10 months of the year to stare at horizontal rain from a cafe window.
Has daz finally lost it?
When I see supposed lefties or labour supporters whining that their cheap weekend in the Lake District isn't possible any more because there aren't enough foreigners willing to work for shit wages then yes, I have lost it.
Your vision sees domestic tourism destroyed
Places like the Lake District would benefit from less tourism. It's been turned it into a theme park where rich landlords from outside the area have bought up all the property so they can rent it to tourists and forced out all the locals. Like any other industry, tourism needs to be sustainable, and in equilibrium with other industries and local populations. In the Lake District and many other places (Cornwall being the best example) it's out of control, and extremely damaging to the area.
their cheap weekend in the Lake District
Maybe if you're having a weekend in Barrow or Whitehaven.
I'm guessing you don't holiday around there?
foreigners willing to work for shit wages
Same wages you want locals to do it for. Why are they willing to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to do it if the money is so awful?
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't do it but a younger me did and was quite happy for seasonal work during uni. Just as many of my peers genuinely benefited from a zero hours contract.
It's not the terms of employent that are at fault but the abuse of them. As already pointed out you are trying to assign simple solutions to a complex problem and in doing so making yourself look like a total ****. What other industries should we be sacrificing at the altar of your twisted vision of socialism? Or should we just stop ****ing about and just do a full on Year Zero?
As said above there’s a threshold at what customers are willing to pay.
That is about to be recalculated in this Brave New World.
Your vision sees domestic tourism destroyed, leaving folk to either go abroad or just never have a holiday.
This may well happen and I'll be out of a job. It's going to be more expensive all around for everyone. I hope that's the opposition game plan, it should also knacker the Tory voter majority in domestic holiday areas.
Restructuring costs time and money we have neither.
There will be no real investment in poor people jobs.
The modern dark satanic mills of today (Amazon, Sports Direct etc) will absorb some slack.
That's about it.
their support for slave wages
I stopped reading there. Not worth engaging any further, is there.
Your vision sees domestic tourism destroyed, leaving folk to either go abroad or just never have a holiday
so he is right then that your right to have cheap UK hols means peasants have to work for peanuts?
😉
molgrips
Full MemberSimply raising low workers pay isn’t going to help, that’s just going to drive inflation.
By most metrics, low paid workers' wages have fallen drastically over the years. And yet inflation still happened. That's a big part of the issue- people have been priced out of areas, life has got far more expensive.
I think we have to be honest and say that we don't really know what the relationship between low paid workers' salaries and inflation is. It's clearly a small part of a very big equation. Simple "X leads to Y" arguments in economics are pretty much always wrong.
Plus the previous link between inflation and employment seems to have gone wrong over the last 10 years and don't follow what happened over the previous 60 years.
One of the ‘unique’ qualities of the UK over other developed economies is poor productivity per capita as well as the low levels of business investment in comparison to our peers. The economy has been heavily ‘subsidised’ by cheap imported labour plus a lot of financial ‘stimulus’ was simply used by businesses executives to boost their bonuses through share buybacks rather than investing in the business.
In terms of how that plays out locally, here on Mull the building company who built my house is primarily a Polish crew who have been here for 14 years. A lot of businesses here are struggling for staff due to lack of cheap, rental accommodation and people willing to pay £30/day to come over on the ferry from the mainland to be paid £10/hr. Not entirely Brexit related, but rental property owners can’t find cleaners to do weekend changeovers - someone was offering £200 for 6 hours work but still can’t find anyone.
By most metrics, low paid workers’ wages have fallen drastically over the years.
Unless you’re pretty bloody lucky, or rich, EVERYONES wages have been static, at best, and dropping in real terms for ten years+ now.
I know it hits the lowest paid hardest, but the present economic model means nobody but those at the top have seen any rise in their incomes for the last decade.
I’m sure Brexit will change all that
Oh… hang on a minute….
dazh
stop repeating that bollocks
Are you new around here?
dovebiker
Free MemberOne of the ‘unique’ qualities of the UK over other developed economies is poor productivity per capita
This basically depends on how you measure productivity though. Even the very simple "divide GDP by the number of hours worked"- which incidentally puts us bang in the middle of the G7- gives results that vary wildly on how you calculate those hours. Public sector industries are generally undervalued against the exact same activities done for profit since they don't "make money". And of course the financial system enables people or countries to claim "productivity" by taking it from others (which is why Ireland's often named as the most productive country in the world- companies book a lot of profits there which are really made elsewhere)
IMO, but I don't think this is contentious, there isn't really an accepted definition of productivity which actually really measures productivity itself. It's a very difficult thing to measure but we've pretty much just accepted definitions that don't really capture it and aren't really very useful for comparison between countries or between two different economic states in the same country. Which is fine til people use them that way, which is pretty much all the time with pop economics.
How do you measure the productivity of a teacher? We’re a service led economy; so much harder to measure productivity compared to manufacturing focused economies.
Yup. And at the other end of the scale, the 5250 Amazon employees in Luxembourg officially make 8.4m euros a year each in income, because sales across europe including the UK are funnelled through there to avoid tax. All those sales and warehouse staff and drivers and factories in the UK? Not very productive. Those accountants and executives in Luxembourg? Hilariously productive.
(and yet weirdly they declare a loss in Luxembourg)
By most metrics, low paid workers’ wages have fallen drastically over the years. And yet inflation still happened.
You misunderstand, I'm not saying that falling wages prevents inflation, but raising them might. Inflation had happened in recent years but it's best historically very low - borderline too low in fact.
Loads of things affect inflation, however raising wages of the lowest paid *without other measures* is likely to raise prices for everything (because the low paid workers work to produce or provide the things) which is inflation, but the money will be siphoned off to the pockets of the already well off.
I just love "lefties" arguing against raising low paid workers wages
Everyones wages have not been dropping - only the low and middle earners. rich folk are taking far more share of the nations wealth
Worried about the inflationary effect of raising low paid wages? TAx the rich more!
The rich will just finds ways around it as they are not in the PAYE system like most of us.
One of the things that may have helped is to have heavily governed the housing market as rent/mortgage is too big a ratio of a persons income and spending money on rent/mortgage is not really helping the overall economy.
I would have put a max increase on a house sale price of 2% a year meaning that a £50K house purchased 20 years ago could only be sold for max of £75K today rather than the £150-200K it is probably selling for.
I just love “lefties” arguing against raising low paid workers wages
Who has?
Loads of things affect inflation, however raising wages of the lowest paid *without other measures* is likely to raise prices for everything (because the low paid workers work to produce or provide the things) which is inflation, but the money will be siphoned off to the pockets of the already well off.
I'll agree with this, not sure what the best "other measures" would be though
I just love “lefties” arguing against raising low paid workers wages
I hope you're not aiming that me because that's very specifically not what I'm arguing for.
I’ve just pointed out the real world economics of running a hospitality business, so it’s not me either
Molgrips - thats exactly what you said
colp - if the economics of running a business do not allow them to pay wages to attract staff the wages are too low and if that means prices are too low yo have to raise prices. You cannot have any business without staff
