Plus 21p. Wow! Big Deal!
 

It has just been announced that as from the 1st September 2008 the minimum wage will go up by 21p to £5.73 per hour.

That’s a rise of a smidgin over 3.8%.

It was also recently reported that if a household income is below £16.5k pa that household is living in POVERTY.

At 40 hours per week the minimum wage equates to £11,918.40 pa on which Income Tax is paid.

Verb sap!

Better than a kick in the teeth but as Mahatma Ghandi put it:
The world has enough for every man's need, but not enough for every man's greed.

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3.8% will be more than many will get. What is the average wage rise this year and rate of inflation?

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Presumably when they quote the £16.5k figure it refers to more than 1 person in a household though?

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In April I get a payrise of 4.8% :D

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the minimum wage is and always has been an INSULT, then the dummies that think its ok, bitch about people who stay on benefit.:(

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Social care wages are ****e in a lot of areas, best I can offer staff is £5.90 per hour plus fuel allowance, that comes out of hourly £10.50 service rate. Some Preferred Providers are paying £6 but not many. Some of the biggest agencies up here are pay £5.55 and no fuel allowence on a £11.38 & £12.00 hourly services rate. They could pay a lot more but don't see why they should and this leads to poor retention rates in the industry at a time when we have a massive short fall of viable candidates.

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You must work for a decent company then.

I have not looked at what an average rise is this year so yours might be naff.

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The guy that pays for my keep don't give me big rises at all, then he wonders why I shout and pull faces at during Prime Ministers Question Time:rolleyes::D

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There are two real problems.

First wage increases and inflation are all quoted in percentages and even an amoeba will know that 5% of £100 is a lot less in cash than 5% of £1,000. When bread goes up, as it surely will because of the world wheat shortage, it will not go up by X% but by X pence with scant regard as to who is buying it. Or in other words if a loaf of bread goes up by 20p it won’t matter if the buyer is earning £1,000 per week or just £100. They will both have to pay the extra 20p.

No jokes about bread going up because the dough was rising please.

The other problem is that the minimum wage discourages many employers from paying the market rate for the job, which in many, many cases would be higher than the minimum rate.

As I understand it Cyfr by household they mean an average family and it would be income from all sources. This would include tax credits, child allowance, or whatever it is called these days, etc.

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I think that is the average (working class) household income combined, as its close to what we have for a family of 5 coming in per annum

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whats you winjin at.at least there is a minimum wage people have short memories.i can still remember when the tories opposed it and when they were in power rejected it and people were still working for a pittance not so long ago people like care workers ,factory workers ,and shop assistants on £2.50 an hour. thatcher and her cronies said it would destroy the british economy.it did the opposite...

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that is perfectly true, its an improvement to what was, under the tories, but that dont mean its ideal/good etc, there needs to be a level that is adequate and ABOVE benifits.;)

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What has happened since the introduction of the minimum wage is that many employers, who were paying their workforce a wage higher than the minimum, found an excuse to get rid of them and then took on new workers at the minimum wage.

I don’t suppose that anyone has considered this but if we are to have a minimum wage, which we have, the logical progression from that is to have a MAXIMUM wage.

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And what figure would you set that at then?

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I agree we should have a minimum wage.

However, raising it too much would raise inflation and have a negative impact, especially on those who are worse off financially. It needs to be handled carefully, and benefits need sorting to be for the needy not the lazy.

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Changing the subject slightly. I'm sure i read not long ago that along with the minimum wage there is also a minimum holiday entitlement. Does anyone know if this is correct or have i been dreaming again?

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I’ve posted this quote before and I make no apologies for posting it again.

The world has enough for every man's need, but not enough for every man's greed.
-- Mahatma Ghandi

Or more appropriately:
This country has enough for every man's need, but not enough for every man's greed.
-- Mahatma Ghandi

And therein lies the problem. 10% of the population are taking 90% of the cake and to make matters even worse the bulk of it is going abroad.

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I used to work for £3.25 an hour when I was 16.

I don't think there should be a maximum rate. I don't think there should need to be a minimum rate either.

21p is a reasonable rise in my opinion though.

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i once had a job where they paid me per day and it worked out as £1 and hour...... is that fair?

THAT is why we have minimum wage! because some employers dont give a monkeys about their employee's and will pay as little a possible

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as Cyfr mentioned, in 'working' households it is not uncommon for both parents to be working which gives youa combined of ~£23K

not huge but not rubbish either. What I have a bigger issue with is that on these sort of salaries its almost impossible to buy a house and then to afford to run it.

should we have a maximum? no way! how do you drive people to perform better if they can reach a point where they get no reward for that effort? Without that this country is right royally stuffed

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Depends what your job was and how old you were, and how good you were at the job in my opinion.

Equal pay isn't fair to a lot of people but we have that. Who said life was fair?

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I agree with you. No way should we have a maximum wage.

At least no-one is working for a pittance these days thanks to the mimimum wage. My first job paid £40 for a 40 hour week. That's £1 an hour. At least you don't get that these days.

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You must have thought so or you would not have done it.

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i didnt, i took the job to tide me over till i found a better one... some money was better than none at the time... i worked for 7am to 8pm 7 days a week. sometimes working day, night and the next day.. i was 17 at the time and i had bills to pay.

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I get the feeling it was a paper round...

I think you should be paid the quality and amount of work you do, not just a standard rate of pay regardless of the work done.

for example, if you have two builders... one is strong because he works out in his extra time, and has the ability to shift more bricks, and do more labour in general, whilst the other isn't as strong and can only shift 3/4 of the bricks that the first can move.

more work gets done by the first builder so he shouldn't get the same standard of pay just because he's the same age, same experience etc.

That's the way I see it anyway. You want more money, work harder. In this day and age everyone has access to education and support, there is no reason why you cant get qualifications and stick with your low paid jobs. You just have to get up and do it instead of standing around whinging about it.

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emma what was this job?

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taxi operator..... yes i was taken advantage of, but, like i said, i needed money, i had rent and food and bills to pay.

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Do you know this thread could easily be linked with the polish child benefit thread, If less were allowed to be sent to polish families perhaps our minimum wage would look half decent.
sorry dont mean to link the two

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how about raising taxes so we can increase wages a bit and send a bit more out in child benefit at the same time :p obviously saving a bit of the taxes to go towards a nice new car for gordon brown...

you cant discriminate like that, there'd be an uproar.

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How about getting rid of this Government that year on year spend more than they raise in taxes?

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I don't quite understand who votes for Labour....

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How would you quantify the amount of work done by a bus/train driver blazey? Is the driver working any harder when the bus/train is full than when it is almost empty?

Which job/profession is the most valuable to the community?

Is it the brain surgeon, lawyer, architect, policeman, shop assistant, the worker at the re-cycling yard, the worker at the landfill site, the power station worker, the plumber, electrician, bus driver, paramedic, the office/factory cleaner, the teacher, the people who take away the rubbish that is produced, the farmer, the car mechanic, fireman, librarian, GP, nurse, the brewer, the factory worker, the bank clerk etc?

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Maybe you should have moved to a different corner ;)

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I'm not saying go off profession, i'm saying go off quality of work. A good bus driver would reach the stops when he should I expect and not have any complaints against him. Obviously some jobs have less variation in the effort needed than others.

Public services should always be paid more than any ordinary job though, which I see as police, fire service, teachers, nurses, the government, solicitors, judges etc... things that we need in order to achieve our rights I guess.

You speak as if you have always had a minimum wage. I'm not suggesting a step back, I'm suggesting a step forward.

I'd rather be differentiated as a person and given my worth than be given what is worth to me as part of an entire workforce. Where is my appreciation and respect in treating me as a number, as a faceless body? Do I not have individual value as a human being?

Where is the equality in being given a wage that is represents nothing of your worth?

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And even I think thats going a little bit too far!

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£1 is not bad, before tinkerbelle entered her second life and vanished from her first life she only used to earn 50p each punter - do a search for old thread on subject :D

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apologies for the flippancy , but just using it as an example , a worker is no different than a hooker , they sell their skills to the highest bidder , remember the old saying "there is no sympathy at work " no one is tied to a job , if you want more money move on , if the place down the street is paying 25p an hour more move on , you can be sure the Employers have no qualms about letting you go when business goes flat .

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Yeh I never understood the loyalty to your employers thing. Very rarely you find a good employer who genuinely wants the best for their workforce.

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Throwing my two cents in, I would not support a Maximum Wage, it would stiffle ambition, you only need to look at the history books and see all the great advances the USSR had, or not as the case may be.:)

However the current minimum wage is a joke. I was paid nearly 5 pounds an hour years ago in a nightclub as a barman.

One of the problems with this whole wage business is that those who deserve a better slice of the pie always lose out to those who are seen to be doing nothing worthwhile, hedge fund managers, stockbrokers, airline pilots, oppps.

That last one was a joke, I personally have paid for all my training and have spent the last 5 years trying to stay afloat, it has cost me lots and lots of money, I would rather not say how much, but i expect to get dammed well paid at the end of all of this.
Thats the crux of the matter, people who invest in themselves, through some kind of eduction, expect to earn more money than someone who has not. Eg a plummer rather than a shop worker. I am not suggesting that one is more important than the other, its just the way it is.

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Dare I suggest that the people most useful to the community as a whole are the people in the refuse disposal industry and the factory/office/street cleaner, not forgetting the human burial industry?

Without them we would be knee deep in rubbish with disease and vermin rife.

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Dare I suggest that wages on the whole, like any goods are based on supply and demand. The jobs that most people could do like you mentioned above tend to be paid less than say as mentioned above an airline pilot.

I am generally a fairly modest person but if being honest with myself I do class myself as an asset to my company. They reward my skills and knowledge with what I class as a good wage. You can not just walk out of school into my job, it has taken me years of training, both from the companies I have worked for and my own personal self training to make me into the person I am today. I am still and have never stopped learning and improving my skills to make be both faster and more efficient in my role. As an example if I have not been in work yesterday the company could have lost tens of thousands of pounds in non recoverable sales.

So yes I do expect to be rewarded more than some other professions.


On re-reading my post I want to point out that all that twoddle I wrote up their does not make me a better person than anyone else, just better at my particular profession than many other people.

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AOL

I've spent over 10 years learning, pushing myself and really putting the effort in to becoming the best WebSphere AppServer/MQ, Java/TAM/LDAP/etc geek I know.

I look after > 50 systems of which someof which on their own would cost my employers well over a million pounds a day if they aren't running and that doesn't even get near to damage to reputation.

I earn what most people would think is a lot of money but as Neil says considering the responibility and training etc that I have put in to do it I think I am paid a fair wage(more would of course be nice :D )

.

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I suppose so, but perhaps if we had to live in squalor we would appreciate the concept of recycling more...

but saying that, the lads I live with don't so that's probably not true.

But yes I agree, the refuse disposal is vital. I'm not too sure about the human burial though... that is hardly something that people wouldn't happily do themselves for free if they had nobody to do it for them.

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Some are quite expert digging their own :D

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If i remember rightly you tried to get away with paying 25p? :D:D:D

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OOOOOO Jen you are naughty :eek::yelrotflm

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Now you are getting confused. What I actually wanted was to pay the standard 50p front door entrance fee but be able to slip in and out of the back door when I wanted.

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HAHAHAHAHAHA

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It is not the proper role of government to set wages for private enterprise. The unintended consequences of such mandates are always negative in the long run.

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Do they have a minimum wage in America?

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Yes. Currently at $5.85 per hour. However, wages are set by the markeplace....i.e., supply and demand. I can't speak for every state - but in my neck of the woods, even an entry level hash slinger at McDonald's will be offered a starting salary of $8.50 an hour.