It was never created to give you a decent life, it was created to make sure you have life. To be honest I think people on minimum should take a second to remember that in general they're worth a lot lot less than they're paid, that's why the minimum wage exists.
Put quite simply your (who is "we" btw?) expectations in remuneration for all full time workers are not in the least realistic. Your problem is right there in your second paragraph: " people are paid less than what they can 'live' on " It's your definition of 'live on' that's at fault. Not owning a car, not owning a house and not being able to afford a holiday are neither definitions of nor real poverty. "I want because I expect" doesn't mean you should. You've even quoted £14,400 as a realistic wage from a reputable source which states that a car is not considered essential, an argument against your own case. Large corporations could no doubt pay more to their staff but not every employer can. A corner convenience store owner is unlikely to be able to afford 2 employees at £25-30,000 to pay for "luxuries" the spoilt generation seem to think they have a right to expect. A luxury is pretty much anything you could actually live without without hardship. A roof over your head, food, utilities etc. they are necessities. Cigarettes, booze, a car, a holiday, they are luxuries. So I'll say it again but in plain English: Your expectations, whether for yourself or your peers, are unrealistic and it's time to grow up and live in the real world where you can't have everything you want. Edit: and while we're on the standard of living of the last decade or two, it's been in large part brought about by soaring house prices and credit lending, allowing many people to enjoy these luxuries on a pay tomorrow basis and now look where we are. Quite simply most people could not afford to live at the standard of living they had adopted. Edit2: And in relative terms, compared to a billionaire I'm a pauper living in a" mud hut", but I'm not really
^ This. Some people seem to think that well-paying jobs are a right, and that some people just had them falling into their laps. Nope; it takes hard graft to acquire the qualifications and then more hard graft to work up the ladder. A salary is not to meant to enable a certain lifestyle, it is meant to remunerate you for your work.
Well, I'm glad I'm still the only person on Bittech who lives outside the box, and by that I mean the propaganda system . Everyone else seems to live quite comfortably inside it, and repeat the claims of the powerful, and in fact act as their gatekeepers which prevents working people in the UK from having a decent, fair and dignified living. Oh well here goes. Ah right, so people who serve a social function, like cleaning toilets, should feel lucky they can get £6.08 an hour for doing laborious and exhausting work for 42 hours a week? I mean let's face it, the job is so easy you would want to do it? Correct? Cleaners are hardly contributing to society, and should be paid what they're 'worth', which would be less than minimum wage then? And if it's not cleaners, can you give us some jobs which you think are not worth the minimum wage? I could think of many other jobs which serve no tangible social function, but are paid much more than cleaners (I know you didn't mention cleaners, but you get my point), who actually do serve a meaningful social function and by all accounts should be remunerated highly for it. I don't care if you disagree; they do the jobs other people wouldn't want to do (as do many people earning a minimum wage), and that should immediately tell you they should earn more. Well the Rowntree charity is certainly one of them (as do other charities like FairPensions, and a number of other social organisations). The Green Party supports a living wage (my party of choice). Many unions in the UK support a living wage. And I would fathom the vast majority of the UK population would support one if asked. In fact, Rowntree's very research is based upon beliefs held by the public - they asked people would they thought they needed to have a decent life. You clearly diverge in what is regarded as 'fair' and 'acceptable'. And BTW when I said 'afford a house', I didn't mean a single person should be able to afford a £200K mortgage on their own. I meant be able to at least rent somewhere comfortably if you are single. What you're try to do (as I predicted would happen when I mentioned holiday and car) is take the issue away from reality (that is, what we both would say is an acceptable quality of life) and put it within the framework of: you don't deserve a 5 Series BMW or a 5 bedroom penthouse in Deansgate because you work for Tescos. I'm not saying that. In fact, my personal beliefs about consumer capitalism are much harsher - much of the things we want to consume are because we are told to consume them by the propaganda system in adverts made by for-profit institutions. I would prefer it if we moved towards a society which produced for use, not produced for excessive consumption because it fulfils a profit agenda, but that's a debate for another time. My point is this, how many things could you 'live' without in todays society? Could you participate fully if you couldn't afford a computer or interest access? What if you had to pay increasing rent costs and a mobile phone contract was something you could no longer afford? What if you had children but couldn't afford, without getting tax credits, to send your kids to a childcare centre while you worked, even though you and your partner worked full-time? I'll quote Rowntree's findings (A minimum income standard for the UK in 2010) of what people thought was an acceptable standard of living, because you may find it interesting (even if it's from 2010): They go on to say that the groups asked did not believe a car was an essential item. I personally disagree, as I mentioned, but nevertheless some of those items I'm sure people on here would regard as not essential, but really they'd be kidding themselves that they could live meaningfully without them. Small businesses who genuinely can't afford to pay a living wage could be subsidised by the state to make up the difference, just as large corporations are now given massive state benefits with tax breaks/tariffs/subsidies and so forth. Again, we're not talking about gold-plated salaries; we're talking about a bit more each year so that people are not on the edge of working poverty, and yes if you can't afford a holiday, or can't afford a drink once a week with your friends, you're on the edge of working poverty in 2012 (and that's reflected in general public attitudes towards these matters as the Rowntree research shows). No they are not. They're consistent with general British attitudes of what we expect to receive from society after we've given a full working week (apart from the car part, but I disagree with that ). The housing bubble was not caused by normal working people. Well, yes I actually do believe they should be a right (in fact my personal belief is much more radical than what the limits of your mind could imagine , but within the existing framework of contemporary capitalism, yes it should be a 'right'). If you work a full week in the UK, you should be able to have a life that meets certain levels of acceptable standards of living. What those acceptable limits are we could debate, but I'm definitely with Rowntree and the majority of UK citizens who have much more realistic perception of what is an 'acceptable standard of living than some people on Bittech. A single person in the UK needs to earn at least £15,000 a year before tax in 2011, to afford a minimum acceptable standard of living, according to Rowntree, and that's without a car which I think is essential.
Yes, they should. There are plenty of people in the world who'd do it for far, far less. I never said it was easy. Breaking rocks for 14 hours a day in sub-Saharan Africa isn't easy, but there are plenty of people in the world who're glad that they can at least scrape a living doing that. That doesn't mean I'd want to do it. I never said that, either. Of course cleaners contribute to society, but it's undeniable that the minimum wage is used to pay British cleaners more than their market value, if it wasn't, then it wouldn't be required. I don't object to a minimum wage, I just think that there's too much of an assumption that it should provide everyone with a comfortable life. It should exist to ensure people can eat, and live somewhere, and pay their bills. It shouldn't be set at such a level to guarantee everyone on it a nice cushy life.
'Worth' and 'what is profitable in a capitalist society' are two different things though. Markets don't properly account for the social benefits of jobs. Clearly they don't, or people who kick a spherical object into a net wouldn't be remunerated more so than people who save lives, or clean toilets, or did any number of the other jobs which we all agree serve a meaningful function. Or speculators on Wall Street who simply manipulate digital money - would they be remunerated more so than someone who put fires out (risking their lives for people), if society reflected the attitudes of justice and fairness which everyone has? Market value is therefore an extremely bad indicator of what is fair and just.
I see the minimum wage existing to stop people being screwed by their employers. They would like to pay as little as possible if they can it's more money in their pockets. My ex employer had some work off loaded to the local prison, saved him having to employ someone else maybe that led to quite a few of us not being needed. Hmm crime does pay.
I think that you are trying to squeeze socialist principles into a capitalist system. Won't work --especially not on the population scales we are talking about. Socialism works in small communities. On larger scales we get people abusing the system, as the OP complained about. Basically, market forces apply: a job is paid as much as people are prepared to pay for it combined with how easy it is to find someone (else) to do the job. People who clean toilets get paid peanuts because most people are not prepared to pay much for a clean public toilet (drive up the price at Euston Station from 20p to a pound and hear people blow a fuse) and it is easy to find someone to do the job. Surgeons get paid more in the NHS because not everyone can be a surgeon, but again, most people will not pay for good health care --they expect it for free (or at least to be included in their small NI fee). Those who are prepared to take out a BUPA insurance go private, and there surgeons earn a mint. Millions of people, conversely, readily pay out huge money for season tickets --much more than they'd ever consider paying for good health insurance-- and outstanding footballers are hard to find. Hence they earn the big bucks. Bankers and City brokers earn a mint simply because they control their own salary. It's a racket. We can complain about the social injustice all we want but that's how things work on large population scales and in capitalist cultures. The Scandinavia countries show that it can be done differently, and I'm all for that, but this would involve higher taxation, and I'm sure that the OP would then complain about that. The reason most people moan about other people getting a free ride is because they want a free ride themselves.
You still haven't proposed a suitable way of making your ideas work though, how do you propose to give people more money?
Ah, if only any of us could truly say we're living meaningfully You make your point with admirable tenacity, but I'm not buying it. The Rowntree Charity may have done some research of what the general public regard as essentials in modern day life, but that doesn't do anything for its credibility if you ask me. The general public is likely to be too caught up in the race, it's hardly an independent assessment of what is essential. There's still an ethnocentric attitude bound up in the over-privileged hangover of the British Empire's colonial conquests. How can you objectively determine what it means to 'participate fully in society' as everyone has their own perspective on what society is, and it's often heavily skewed by what we absorb, consciously and sub-consciously, from the internet, tv, radio and newspapers. The grass is always greener on the other side and we're bombarded with communications to make us feel everyone else has it better than ourselves and that if only we worked that little bit harder we could have it too, only better! The idea that a dvd player is an essential is plain ludicrous. Take all my gadgets away from me and just provide a well-operated public library system within reasonable travelling distance (e.g. 30 mins walk/10 min cycle) and I suspect I would probably be more contented than I am now due to the regular exercise and organisation it would take to utilise the library rather than sitting on my ever-lazier arse at home with everything at my fingertips. And even then, that library system would still be a privilege, not an essential. Also, we don't need people to save lives. What are they saving them from? They're not saving lives, they're extending lives. And what's the point in extending someone's existence if there's nothing to amuse them - that is why Premiership footballers are paid more than healthworkers. Ill health is not worth worrying about because it's coming to us all in one form or another; boredom on the other hand, god save us!
Nothing could be further from the truth. In a capitalist society you're payed almost precisely what you're worth. I never quite understood the meaning of this term, could you explain it to me please? Of course they would. Anyone can clean a toilet, not anyone can play football at a world class level. The markets value skills which are less common and in demand, and do not reward skills which everyone has very much, regardless of their demand. If it reflected mine, then sometimes, yes. That all depends what you mean by fair and just. I think it's fair that people get paid what they're worth. You seem to think it's fair that those who are worth more should be forced to pay those who are worth less far more than they're actually worth. I'm happy enough with having a minimum wage, but I don't think that should be the so called "Living wage" that many people argue for these days. I think it should be enough to eat, to have somewhere to live, and to pay your bills. You want more? Do a better paying jobs. Your definition of "fair" seems to include having a car, a nice house, money for nice food, and a holiday in Europe once a year. What I don't see, is why I'm working very hard to get a good job so that I can then pay for your car, and your house, and your food, and your holiday. I'm happy enough paying tax to keep you alive, but I don't see why I should have to to do more than that. Do you?
First off, apologies if my second reply was a bit snappy, I received bad news on the weekend, but that doesn't change my sentiment. Delusional paranoia? Car + Holiday + House + any luxury does not = dignified living. They are materialistic measurements of a commercial, capitalist society. Just because you've grown up surrounded by these things, whether with personal benefit or experience of or exposure to advertising doesn't mean they are essential items. It's rather ironic that an extreme socialist would use them to measure quality of life. I haven't stated anywhere that cleaners are not worth or should not receive the minimum wage. But it's the minimum wage, not your proposal for a comfort life minimum wage. You used the terms house, car, holiday. No-one has put any specific definition on them with regard to level of luxury. Your own house, car or holiday is a luxury above and beyond the necessities of life. You work up to them, if you're fortunate and diligent enough to do so. Since when was a mobile phone or internet access a necessity? What do you think people did before they existed? As to children, tbf if at the outset, before having children, you cannot afford to support them should you actually be having children in expectation of someone else paying for them? If so, why doesn't everyone have 7 or 8 children if they want them. Oh, but who will pay for them then? After all, birth control, another comparatively modern invention, is accessible for free. It's called taking responsibility for your own life. That said, tax credits are available to claim so not an issue, merely a diversion. You keep saying a car is an essential item. Why do you deem it to be essential? Where does the money come from to subsidize these increases to your definition of essential living standards? The government isn't revenue generating on its own and they're running out of assets to sell. It has tax receipts in one form or another, from me, from my neighbour, from the man across the street, as well as from businesses. Quite frankly I don't want to pay for you to go on holiday. I'd rather any excess money I had went to a charity to help something that or someone who doesn't have the basic necessities of life. You say they are consistent with the general British attitutes of what we expect to receive. Please point me to the results of surveys conducted on those who will have to foot the bill for your "minimum" wage demands - every working man and woman in the country. What's your definition of "normal working people", since collectively the majority of property at average pricing levels is owned by what I would term "normal people" as opposed to the minority rich?
3lusive, I would hazard a guess that given a decent salary package and a job you enjoy much of your malaise would evaporate away. It'll happen if you want it to. Minimum wage is an interesting aside, I've always viewed it as another form of benefit and it seems most in this thread do too. Back on to the original topic - scroungers - what's the fix? I know very little about benefits having been lucky enough never to have had to claim them, but I can't help feeling that controlling the monies doled out is the answer. If all benefits were paid into a form of debit card, with only a certain, limited amount of cash available for withdrawal, and somebody scrutinising the spending habits on said card, it would be fairly straightforward to spot at least some of the abusers. The problem with giving people access to physical cash is that it can't be accounted for once it leaves the banking system, so there is no way to spot the cheaters other than observing their behaviour. If someone has a sports car parked outside their house and they are known to be in receipt of benefits it's likely that something is wrong. In fact, if some of the most prolific benefit fraudsters applied the same acumen and attention they do cheating the system to actual work then we might have a few more entrepreneurs in the pipeline!
It does not work like that. Benefit scroungers are not identified by how they spend it, but by whether they have other, hidden sources of income. That sports car is paid for by the jobs they do off the books while the benefit money is spent on life's necessities. The council flat is rented out at a premium while they live somewhere else funded by illegal or unregistered activities. A cursory inspection shows that the benefits are used as intended. Problem is, they weren't eligible for them in the first place.
You can tell I'm from a totally blinkered middle class upbringing can't you! A fair point well made... But what's the answer? We all just merrily pay our taxes and the vast majority of us never really question who/what we're funding unless it's shoved in our faces.
3lusive. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/propaganda BMW advertising isn't propaganda, it's advertising, proapaganda is used by North Korea, the Nazis, and other terrible regimes that you should remember when you complain you that cleaners only get £6 and hour, NHS healthcare, a public transport network, non-corrupt policing,, and a free education in the UK. Unless I know someone personally - it doesn't matter to me whether they're from the UK or not. If I pay tax, I'd rather it was sent to some parts of the world where it could have much more of an impact, than someone on minimum wage (which I am only just above at the moment.) The exception to this is when its better for the ecomonmy as a whole. You can make decision based on fairness rather than the economy - but in the long term everyone will lose out.
Interestingly the HMRC just launched a new calculator to show where your tax money does go https://esi2calculator.hmrc.gov.uk/...sonal+Tax+Calculator/en-GB/summary?user=guest Welfare is the biggest place my taxes go, I pay ~£1600ish towards it every year. Sadly for me, more of my money goes on "Government Administration" than it does on the Environment
Too many to reply to. I'll try and get round to responding to the majority of it tomorrow. All interesting stuff though. Also, I'v always wanted to know this - how do you multi-quote one message but retain the blue marker next to each quote, like Carrie did on mine?
There's a button next to "quote" which if you hover over it says "multiquote this message", I think you just click that. I wouldn't know though, I write my own tags like a big boy. xD
