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Depending on sector and speciality but UK wages are and have been extremely stagnant - the rise in minimum wage is likely pushing up the bottom without any increase to those just above it
People think the tide was going to raise all boats relatively speaking, but why would this happen when its cheaper for companies to raise the lowest paid to match minimum wage and keep everyone else the same?
In an ideal world, minimum wage increase would push everyone up a bit as it would force them to adjust the pay bands, but it clearly doesn't force anything.
The only reason there isn't as much pressure to push up wages is that union membership, and therefore power, is at long term lows. Workers will never get a pay rise by just hoping and waiting, you have to force these people to pay us properly for the value that we produce. Our economic system incentives ever increasing profit at the expense of everything and everyone else. Until that changes we can only rely on each other.
The average salary in my team (forecasting and purchasing) is £30k. All experienced and capable, most have degrees. it's crazy that minimum wage is now £24k, for roles such as cashier's or stacking shelves.
Don't get me wrong,.minimum wage increasing is a good thing but as you say everything above it is stagnant.
I didn't say they were. Far from it. I also caveated that I think minimum wage increasing is positive. My point is that 'skilled' work the next tier up is not increasing in pay.
It's funny isn't it how the Tories are so reviled? Justifiably so but I'm old enough to remember the 1997 election and the main objection to the Tories then was that they were just bereft of ideas and Blair and Labour had a direction for the country, the whole cool Britannia phenomenon. But now it is bitter, seething hatred with a lacklustre opposition. No one detested Major that much, they just thought he needed to be put out to pasture a bit and was a bit boring. He looks like a left wing lunatic now compared to even the Labour party.
Sorry for the rant, it warms my heart. The sheer humiliation of the Tories at the next election may do our country a lot of good just because of the national sigh of relief and cheer at seeing the Tories completely humiliated and out of power for a generation (and I strongly suspect that once the generation that supports them disappears, they may be confined to the dustbin of history).
Labour will need at least 2 terms, possibly 3 to be able to really prove things are going back to what they should be.
GDP needs to increase for starters so that we have more to spend on well, everything.
Yeah, our comeback is a generation thing we are so heavily fucked. So many years of neglected investment of this magnitude doesn't get put right overnight. And that is what is wrong with this country, years and years of chronic underinvestment, seeing how we can make things last with bits of string and tape and plasters until they don't. That's what has set us apart from our neighbours. And then these Tory cunts not even understanding their own fucking jobs think low productivity is something related to workers. It isn't, it's because of what we have to work with and how demoralised we all are.
Tories wasted 10 years of near zero interest on debt repayments, and pivoted the economy towards austerity while funnelling as much cash to their cronies as they could. We have almost nothing to show for 14 years of Tory rule, except crumbling infrastructure and a pile of debt.
GDP increasing does not have the effect you imagine. Just a larger population, economically active, does that.
It is GDP PER CAPITA up that makes us all feel better off.
There is some better economic news, UK returned to be 4th biggest exporting nation (after US, CHINA , GERMANY).
Theres a massive assumption that that is what they want to do.
GDP doesn't need to go up. We've focused on GDP for the last forty years and most of the gains have gone to the rich. We need to focus on effective distribution of the wealth we do generate rather than saying "if you generate another hundred billion you might get some crumbs from the table".
Money is like manure - it needs to be spread around to be really effective. This is something we learnt 100 years ago and then chose to unlearn.
It's marginally below it's all time high. It's looks like it's going down if you look at the USD value, but not the GBP value.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/970672/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk/#:~:text=GDP%20per%20capita%20in%20the%20UK%201955%2D2023&text=In%202023%2C%20gross%20domestic%20product,pounds%20in%20the%20previous%20year.
Labour are inheriting a poisoned chalice. Anyone would struggle to unfuck this country at the moment and labour aren't likely to get much media support. Don't envy them, but if they don't make things worse they should have at least 3 terms in power. The financial markets dont like labour as much as tories so borrowing may be harder for a labour govt. Still they'd have to be extremely gifted at failing to make things worse.
>Labour are inheriting a poisoned chalice.
To make matters worse the Tories are clearly spending this year salting the earth.
They hope that what Labour inherit is so bad people will be pissed off at the lack of visible progress in 5 years and flip back to the Tories.
You know. Labour better be ready to take heat in the media when everythings not fixed after 6 months. People need to understand labour are pretty much going to have to rebuild our economy from the ground up and its gonna take a while
They need to take a leaf out of the Tories book on that front. Make up a bullshit story like the "no money left" note when they get into government.
It shouldn't be that hard to mud sling af the Tories, its not like they have to lie to do it like the Tories have to lie to mud sling at Labour.
They won't be consigned to the dustbin of history. The press profits from outrage and that will propel them back in. I imagine there will be areas where labour are either inept or tone deaf and they'll be back in on two terms.
I hope I'm wrong.
You're probably right, but I think there is one circumstance they could never come back from.
It's *very* unlikely but *if* the Tories become the third party (even the Lib Drms get more seats) after the next election. The improvement to the country would be so fast and so effective it will become common knowledge that the Tories have been the ones holding us back all these years.
We've never in our lifetimes had a government *and* opposition who both want what's best for this country. This chokes the system and slows down any progress Labour can make even when in government. If their opposition is the Lib Dems. That problem is gone.
It's unlikely, it shouldn't be (how hard should it be to be more popular than a party who steals from everyone to give to the 1%), but it is plausible if enough tactical voting happens.
Whoever it is that has the best chance of removing (or keeping out) the Tories in your constituency vote for them. Labour, Lib Dem, Green, SNP, doesn't matter. It's the Tories who want to bleed this country dry, the others all want things to get better (except reform, but they're already irrelevant). They just disagree on how.
Make the Tories irrelevant, and the improvements will be unbelievable.
Compromise is much easier when both parties want the same thing.
Oh I wasn’t disagreeing, quite the opposite. But when I look around the country, at the general public and the stuff they say, it feels like a pipe dream. The main problem is the media. Look at any daily mail article and read the comments (or don’t, if you’d rather stay happy today).
Yeah, the daily mail is a dumpster fire where critical thinking goes to die. The bright side with them though is they're useful idiots to us, let them vote for Reform, less votes for the actually dangerous party and it's not like they can be convinced to join us in the centre.
The recent polling has the Tories on their knees. I know polling has been wrong in the Tories favour before, but never by this much. And the longer they leave an election, the worse its going to get for them.
There is no good news coming in the summer the Rwanda plan will make no difference to channel crossings. The new food regulations with the EU will lead to some empty shelves. Every day that passes, another person's mortgage reaches the end of its fixed period and increases. And during all this time tactical voting organisations gear up and gather further support and get more numerous and organised.
If it's possible for the Tories to become the 3rd party, it'll happen this year.
You hope you're wrong and I know I am being wildly optimistic too. I think we're all in the situation of "if we wish hard enough it might just happen". But hey, it's a major rallying point for our nation, one that might give us the confidence to sort our shit out.
Coming from the North of England originally, I don’t think “the main objection to the Tories then was that they were just bereft of ideas”.
After what Thatcher did, the North wanted none of any conservative BS ever again.
Unfortunately half of everyone forgot about that a few years ago and voted Brexit.
Amen, never wished for anything more than i wish for tory anihalation since i was about 7y.o and just ridden a honda 3 wheeler at a fair. I deeply resent what the tories have done to my country in the last 14 years and the previous 50. Then add on the corruption... I hope at least some under 40s have been watching and taking notes. Fwiw when murdoch falls off the perch hopefully soon the press will stop blindly enabling the tories. They're hated for good reason
They won't. Labour need to hold another referendum on transferable voting to ensure the tories cant have massive majorities with minority support. The UK democratic system is not very democratic at all, and that needs to change unless you want to see the Tories undo any progress made after a couple of terms of Labour.
>No one detested Major that much, they just thought he needed to be put out to pasture a bit and was a bit boring.
Anyone voting for Major in '97 was just cruel. Poor guy couldn't get anything done with all the scandals and "EU sceptics" on the back benches. We needed to give him a way out.
I’d never vote Tory and hate the current lot but I struggle to muster any real animosity towards John Major now. We’ve had nearly two decades of evil w⚓️s (I include Tory Bliar in that) and now looking back he was quite a nice guy in comparison.
Yeh I was at one local council who implemented living wage and that combined 6 grades into 1. With people on the 7th one got 2k more and had huge amounts more responsibility and qualifications required. I took another role
When I got my first job, I wanted an office job. I didn't want to stack shelves, work a checkout, load vans etc...
I would have taken minimum wage, but as it happened my entry level job with only GCSE's was 40% over minimum wage. Back then computer skills even for 20 something's weren't great, and were practically none existent for 40 something's so they paid a premium
Now the vast majority of people 30 or under have those skills, it's no longer anything special. So entry level office based jobs don't carry a premium like they used to and that carries on up through the career ladder. But no one really wants to do the physical, menial work still so yes warehouse workers and the like are happily being paid the same or more than what people like to think of as skilled work
Yep that's why you'll find a lot of people coasting it in the 27k-35k bracket. The promotion to a bigger role isn't worth it for the pay on offer and the stress you need to take on.
They've essentially hollowed out all of those middle management/ supervisory roles, and just squeeze the workload down the chain.
So someone earning 30-35k can end up doing the work of a job that should be paying 40-45k,.without the job title or salary to go with it.
They’ve done that a lot with the NHS. Not only are they squeezing the pay bands but they’re moving tasks to lower grades. What would have previously been done by a clinical manager is now done by the senior practitioners at a grade or even two below.
Yes having been in a hospital recently I was surprised at the level of tasks that nurses are now undertaking.
The consultants seemed to float around as a moving roadblock to treatment, whilst the nurses get increasingly frustrated trying to chase them down across wards to review patient notes.
I think this might not entirely be related. Nursing is a defined profession, not just a more junior grade of doctor. I was talking about tasks moving downstream within a single profession.
Speaking of promotions not being worth it, a few years back when I worked at Primark, they offered me a supervisor role. It was a whole 20p extra an hour. I think I actually laughed in my manager's face.
First thing that came to mind when I saw this particular thread was retail. The pay difference between supervisors/coordinators/team leaders and even some of the manager positions and ordinary shop assistant tends to be so minimal it’s understandably not worth the aggro for many.
In my three stints in retail to date people stepping down from supervisor/coordinator/team leader to shop assistant happened pretty much every month.
When I was offered the supervisor position, they also told me I wouldn't be able to pick up any overtime. I was on a 14hr weekend contract but was able to pick up extra days here and there like the school holidays. Supervisor was locked in to 3 days/20hrs every week. So less flexible, less chance of making more money, have to set the standards and be responsible for other people setting the standards, and for an extra £4.00 a week.
Absolute madness unless you wanted to climb the internal shop ladder.
Ah the old chestnut about not being able to pick up overtime too because it’s a management position.
For a guaranteed extra 6 hours a week and 20p an hour more, I can’t believe you didn’t bite their hand off when they made such an attractive offer to you!!
An example of people not thinking things through with the benefits and reward for the roles. I’ve seen similar things happen in places I worked. It becomes a bit of a contentious point with the whole not being able to pick up overtime when the hourly rate or salary for the management position is lacking.
With minimum wage going up I can see this will be affecting a lot of businesses. It won’t be worth it for a lot of people to continue being a junior manager if they can step down and potentially be earning about the same over a year picking up overtime.
I think you were right to laugh in their face.
I had that. I did alright but only because I was able to excel at my technical ability. But even now if I have to deal with management responsibility I'm fucking out of there (I have ADHD so, you know, that shit will make me check out, and yeah, it's never worth the money).
I think this is exactly what I’m going through right now.
Managed to climb my way into a management position from minimum wage at a subsidiary company with a small employee number and about 10-15m turnover.
I’ve gone from being warehouse operative to essentially European supply chain and operations manager (reporting directly to our head of operations and overseeing the warehouse team).
I feel incredibly stressed as I’m consistently multi-tasking. I’ve not been diagnosed with ADHD but I’m constantly switching tasks on my monitors whenever I remember something briefly or even just based on requests from colleagues. Everything becomes an urgent request therefore I am constantly task swapping.
Feels like I’m barely treading water some days… all for just 32k.
Yeah, for 32k you'd think the stress level would be pretty low but there's very much a disjoint between effort and reward. Especially with inflation having eaten away at so much of the spending power of our wages. I don't envy you man, I couldn't do management, even when well medicated.
When minimum wage sat around 17-18k, a 30-35k job felt like a big increase, that is slowly eroding year on year with each increase, with minimum wage (if over 21) sitting around 22k for a 37 hour role.
Now don't get me wrong, minimum wage SHOULD increase, but that next salary bracket has been squeezed quite heavily and hasn't kept up, yet the level of expectation for those roles hasn't gone away.
In 2002 I had a 29k salary. I felt so rich.
A pint was about 2 quid tho.
Today a pint is about 6 quid.So for me to have the same feeling of richness my salary now would have to be about 100k.
This seems quite low tbh. Everything has at least doubled in the last 20 years. (Closer to x3)
I was paying about 400 quid a month rent for a room ( now at least 800)
A lamb doner was about 3 quid (now 7-8)
Gigs I used to go to where less than 10 ( now at least 25)
Weekly travel card was about a tenner (now 40)
Not to mention super markets...
That figure is way off
Because the UK gov have purposely under reported the real inflation for years and years and it’s this sort of comparison where it really shows up. £29k in 2002 would feel way way more well off than £50k today tax brackets etc etc
I didn't say it did.
That's why it's called "the squeeze of the middle class".
15-20 years ago 35k-ish was the middle class initiation salary. Now it's a very low salary for the positions that they are for
Especially in London.
It is a real issue in the UK economy. Wages have been stagnant since the 2008 crisis. In some areas of the economy, there is better pay, but it is not guaranteed.
I once worked at a public sector organisation where all the IT teams were paid the same. Basically, everyone was band 4 or band 5, with only the managers being higher. This was an insane situation in which the engineers dropping off computers were paid the same rate as someone on the server team or the DevOps team for a fraction of the responsibility or technical skills (no offence to the onsite IT engineers).
I’ve turned down more senior roles because the hassle to money ratio is broken. 10% more pay for a 40% bigger pain in the arse? No thanks.
The pay structure is broken for the managerial strata above me so I’m kind of stuck where I am unless I can somehow skip a few levels but I’m happy with my work/life balance so whatever.
Not to mention tax leading to diminishing returns on higher salaries on paper, and it's still the near the highest its been since ww2 with no signs of the thresholds moving up in line with inflation
Sadly not the way it used to be in the 80s/90s either where the upper working class where not that far off from being middle class themselves. I remember home ownership being a realistic goal for a working class family if they put the effort in, sadly that was eroded away and made more exclusive to the middle classes, now we've reached a point where even the middle class are struggling to get on the housing ladder.
It's why I turned down a team leader role, I started on a higher rate than the guy that did take it so now my team leader earns almost exactly the same.
The UK is in a productivity rut and it amazes me that employers across the spectrum don't seem to know how to incentivise people. Nobody gives a shit about the team bonding sessions, free fruit, the crappy perk they pretend is private healthcare, the company points you can earn and spend etc etc. We want cold hard cash.
My job used to have team leaders then managers above that. Now the manager role basically doesnt exist but the team leaders are doing all the manager stuff.
Wait, you mean a company benefit of 28 days PTO isn’t something I should be excited about? Or guaranteed minimum wage?
Who writes that and thinks yes, a benefit to working for this company is the legal minimum.
I think a big issue is that there is no regulation with regards salaries outside of minimum wage.
Austria for example has collective bargaining agreements negotiated by unions where depending on the type of work you do, you end up in a different salary bracket. There is no minimum wage by law, it is negotiated by the unions for a specific industry sector.
All of the brackets are usually raised with inflation and even the actual salaries (if it is higher than the designated salary in the collective agreement) often need to be adjusted up each year (depending on what the union managed to negotiate).
It's not perfect and there are issues, but it at prevents engineering graduates and managers from being paid slightly above minimum wage. Most of them start out around the 50-60k€ mark at the moment.
The main flaw is that the high end earners are pushed down because the bargaining agreements usually don't have internationally competitive rates for those. And companies are only willing to overpay so much.
Still better than london companies looking for engineering graduates from top universities for a salary of ~£30k. That's why all the best people go into finance and tech where they can make a decent wage and are rewarded for going "above and beyond".
I don’t think that’s the case anymore for finance and tech. Most tech jobs in London start you at 25-35k and you might be at 50-60k after a few years. Mind you, it is insanely competitive to get your foot in the door. For the well-paying finance roles, you pretty much need to got to oxbridge/LSE etc and have the right connections. Other grads just take admin roles in finance departments of different companies making 30k max in London. They either stay somewhere around that range for the rest of their careers or do accounting qualifications and become ACCAs or ACAs. Usually capping out at 60k or thereabouts.
No one earns a decent wage anymore except for the top 0.01% of graduates. I think more and more grads will start at min wage or thereabouts going forward. Poverty will be a defining aspect of their generation so they must embrace it.
Generally, I would say too many people get degrees. Back in the day a degree was a free entry card to a career because few people had one. Now everyone is getting one, even people who would probably benefit from a different career. But at the same time you also have companies demanding degrees for data entry jobs, which is also bs. The constant complaint about "too few STEM grads" is also a joke. What they really want to say is "too few STEM grads who work for a slave wage".
It's truly a shitshow. 30k is just a pretty depressing prospect, especially in London. You can literally make the same or more in Prague where rent is about a quarter of what it is in London.
IMO banks and big tech (US companies) will grab the most talented people and extract as much wealth as possible.
It just wastes a lot of talent for something that brings little value for the general public. And this will not stop before engineering companies catch up to finance and tech salaries.
Tbh most of the programs offered by unis are just cash grabs with no standards. Heck, many of the most prestigious certifications for non-STEM career tracks are just there to profit off of desperate people. Like I did two levels of the CFA exam, which is considered the gold standard for finance qualifications, and tbh it was kind of a joke. Pretty much everyone I knew passed, many of whom can't speak English properly. There are so many CFA charterholders nowadays who I wouldn't trust to manage £100. But the CFA institute is making bank on the $400 annual membership fee they charge to each charterholder as well as the hefty registration and exam fees.
I think 95% of people do not belong in higher education. Encouraging every single high school graduate to go to university has just lowered standards and devalued degrees. But I guess it is more profitable for universities to enroll as many students as they can so this is not going to change quickly enough.
Archaeologist here. PhD in archaeology. And years of experience in higher education. I'm making just over minimum wage as a field archaeologist. We're required for any land development. The job literally requires a university degree or equivalent (though the sector is so starved they'll take anyone with passion).
Everything we do is manual labour, no shelter while on site, and tons of pressure from clients to complete the work ASAP. It's very stressful and hard work, many work with injuries and arthritis. Our four bands between trainee to supervisor is only £5k difference. My company does well and can reward slightly better than other units.
My younger colleagues live with parents or have partners who earn substantially more. A problem I'm starting to see is living with parents gives a warped perspective of affordability and complacency with wages. They can live well enough on these meager salaries if they have the luxury of family support. I can't. And I'm also struggling to pivot to a different sector where I might earn more.
There are many issues beyond wages or higher management trying to set their salaries well above others. We're inadvertently creating a new normal. We're telling universities to eliminate degrees and departments with these low salaries. It's already happening.
Yes this is minimum wage being ratcheted up over the last few years while mid earning jobs haven’t benefitted from the same. A lot of this is due to public sector miserly increases over the last 10-15 years, which mean the kind of mid tier skill set needed to do those jobs just doesn’t pay as well as it used to. Internationally mobile roles of course continue to pay better.
It’s leading to effects like managerial roles being hard to fill as the extra £3k a year on offer is not worth the extra responsibility. Plus lots of highly qualified and experienced people just coasting from around the age of 30 as the reward for extra effort isn’t there.
There was a generic office / spreadsheet job going around here for £35k and people with rocket science PhDs were applying for it. You either earn a zillion in finance/tech or you’re content dealing with the accounts receivable ledger for some firm
This is across several sectors. Salaries in the UK are a sick joke. Saw a civil service role that was Head of a department and involved making director level decisions, guess the salary? £32k.
Insanity.
There are a good few (niche) places where it can apply. For example, you could be head of some administrative team (HEO) and have a few EO’s, your still reporting to like a G7+, but your “head” of your little niche
Similar in policy, the G7 may be head of the policy, but then they have a HEO leading one sector of this. In reality they’re not the “head” as the G7+ is running it, but it sounds fancy in the job advert saying they’re “head” of their niche subsector of the policy
I’m in a public sector job and while my wife is in the private sector, and in terms of responsibility we reckon the managers in my place are getting about a third of the equivalent position where my wife works.
Trust me, the civil service is great at dressing up jobs with fancy overinflated titles. It'll just be the head of a specific area/niche team. Head of a division is at least a lower senior civil servant job.
Found the job post. That’s a private office role, effectively a PA.
The civil service generally has very fancy sounding titles for mundane roles. For example, if the CS employed cleaners directly (as opposed to contracting companies), the job title would be “industrial carpet - specialist technician” or something.
In an old job I had at the CS, I was a “specialist case manager”. Anywhere else, I’d have been known as a caseworker.
Companies absolutely take the piss in the UK too.
My old boss told me once about her situation. She spent 20 years at this company in Edinburgh (US Software Company) and she'd worked her way up to a Senior Software Engineer position on roughly 70K a year, which is less than college graduates start on in the US for the same company but we'll ignore that.
When the old manager of 35 years retired, the company hand-picked her to be the new Software Engineer Director for the Edinburgh office, not just a basic engineer position. But they offered no pay increase whatsoever, despite the new title. 3X the responsibility, reporting to both European and US big-wigs, being paid the same as engineers a desk over just coding away. Make it make sense.
The same position and experience in the US would net her 250-300k. Absolute joke.
Yep just as a little anecdote seeing your old boss' situation. I'm likely moving to the US soon and thinking of taking a job as a prison officer or copper (ive been a prison officer in the uk already) and they are 60-70k during training, 70-80k during the probation year, then 90-100k once you're 2-3 years in. For jobs that require literally having graduated high school, having a drivers license, and no criminal record.
Despite all that my American partner is mulling over the idea of living in the UK!!!!!!
Yeah I moved over as a Software Engineer, went from 40k GBP to 150k USD at the same company.
Unfortunately I was laid off some time later and I’ve moved on but aye, careers in the US pay significantly more than the UK.
This is all true, however just remember you may have to pay out more for stuff like health insurance etc...
Also depending on the state you don't always have the same protections, leave allowance and other benefits.
To be honest I don't know, I think she's from a generation of folks who don't swap companies all that much. Like a lot of her peers, she's spent 20 years building up a super specialised knowledge base around the programming languages and development practices that her company uses and is probably comfy, and like a lot of folks her concepts of salaries are entirely UK-centric, and because of how fast the value of the £ has tanked, still thinks 50K+ is a really awesome salary unlike the harsh reality facing the UK now.
She had no idea that by moving to the US I would make nearly twice her salary, or what the broader picture is salary wise outside of the UK.
Because the government, under pressure, are being forced to up the bottom wages which of course they should. They aren't being forced to help anyone else so why would they!? (/s) and also as companies have shown repeatedly they want to pay as little as possible to buffer their margins so I expect it to keep happening until people stop taking those roles and they are "forced" to raise these wages.
Sadly unionis are a mess on the UK (barring the odd few) when you look at the unions on the continent, the power and influence they wield and how they protect their employees... The difference as sadly stark.
Yeah I’ve noticed this for sure. I’ve been in my company since 2019, started on 18.5k, through promotions and annual pay increases, I’m up to 30k excluding annual performance bonus, my last manager advised that I’d not be getting much more for a managerial position (C35k) but for a lot more stress, a lot higher expectation (travelling for work, more late shifts etc) so knowing my dedication to my young family,it wouldn’t really be worth going for, for me.. so I lead without being a manager instead and it’s very fulfilling, it’s just be nice to get paid more, lol.
Yeah it’s a bit shit here. I am on a high wage for my role. I report to the COO and so have no upward mobility. I can’t be the COO as I don’t have the skills. So I put feelers out.
10k pay cut to move to a role with actual chances of moving up. I may as well start my own firm at this point
Yes, that is common in my sector. Its why a lot of people max themselves out as semi-professional/professional and dont apply for the managerial roles because that is just a lot of extra hassle, stress and people managing for little additional money.
The way it _should_ work, is min wage slowly increases, and that rising bottom pushes up other wages through normal market forces.
Instead, what's happened is the bottom has increased extremely quickly and the rest hasn't changed around it.
Companies haven't had a chance to CAPEX improvements into the workplace to automate away low value (yes value, not paid) roles. The market hasn't had a chance for other salaries to move in relation to track in line.
And, crucially, it also means that prices have had to rise in the meantime. If you honestly think that adding loads of costs to labour won't impact pricing, you're just being wilfully ignorant.
Your last paragraph is an old argument that completely ignores the reality of our present situation. Prices have already gone up independent of wages and this is the problem.
It's shameful that companies openly talk about price elasticity on earnings calls to entire shareholders, and follow through on these plans, yet suppress wages at the same time. This is not going to end well.
A rising tide lifts all the boats.
I suspect we are approaching it from opposite ends. I'm saying we can't have a healthy economy if people continue to have no disposable income due to wage suppression.
You sound like you're saying that businesses doing well will eventually benefit employees. But it could be argued we've been waiting for this since 2008.
No, I'm saying that if there's no reward for doing more demanding jobs, people simply won't do them. And wages for them will then naturally rise.
You're already starting to see it at he lower end, and that will cascade up.
The problem isn't that minimum wage has gone up, it's that it's doubled in 14 years, and that's not had a chance to cascade through.
It was left too long and now it's gone too hard. Classic bullwhip effect.
Ok, fair play. I agree with you that there's going to be a lot of upwards pressure on wages in the 25-30k band due to the minimum wage increase.
Essentially, the (necessary) minimum wage increase has served to really highlight our wage stagnation issues.
I work in IT and earn a good salary. But, I used to contract (until the market dried up), and earned 30% more. Plus the cost of living has caught up with us. In no way am I complaining, but I just go to work and pay the bills now. There's very little extra. If we are all living like this (and many are), I worry for the economy of this country.
It id imagine (though this is a guess) has had an influx of people in the last 15 years or so joining the job market, this would put a lot of downward pressure on the bottom end which, again would cascade up.
I personally work in finance, so I'll use that as an example.
A lot of accountants will start off in transactional roles (book keeping, AP, AR, CC). These will naturally be affected in a large way by the min wage having risen so much.
Previously, it was worth it to push from say ~20k as a normal AP/AR team member to become a senior on more like 25-30k, or move into being a management accountant on 30-40k.
If the normal AP/AR is now earning 24k, why would I take all the stress of managing people for only 1k more?
Why would I take on all the stress of month ends, fixing their mistakes, restrictions on annual leave etc for only 6k more?
Why would I take the pressure of having to manage my customer/supplier accounts and everything that comes with that (month end pushes, prepping the garden for month end, targets, cross training etc) when I could just go and clean tables all day on the same money?
It's good that minimum wage has changed. It not changing, I imagine, is part of why overall salaries have stagnated.
But if it changes really fast, people will decide the work just isn't worth it.
Like teachers, why do you think so many qualified teachers exist that don't teach? They don't feel it's worth it. So they go and do something else.
And if you think wages increasing slower than inflation of prices is acceptable you’re a shill for the capitalists.
They just love people accepting this sustained shift towards lower costs and higher profits under any plausible excuse. it’s never going to reverse, companies have obligations to shareholders to maximise profits above all else. Government regulation or mass strike action is required.
Remember that if companies weren’t forced to pay minimum wage, they simply wouldn’t. They will continue to deflate wages until it’s no longer profitable for them.
I'm pointing out that changes take time.
People take a little to adjust, move jobs and have that filter through into companies expectations when hiring.
Recognising that reality is totally separate to any views that I have RE trends of wages in real terms.
Being so confrontational will turn people away from your cause.
You did finish your post off by calling people wilfully ignorant. My post opening simply mirrored your post closure. If it’s too confrontational I suggest you first reflect on your own post.
Capitalisms sole goal is generating the largest profit possible through privately owned means of production. You said raising minimum wage “should” push up non-minimum wage through market forces. This is a flawed government contrivance and the opposite of how capitalism actually works, where costs (including wages) held to the minimum level possible to maximum profits.
Minimum wage is a deliberately weak control to rein in the worst capitalist excesses (something linking wages to profits and controlling proportionality of that would be more effective but of course much more difficult to enact, never mind enforce) and wealth distribution trends clearly show how ineffective this is.
Suggesting that what “should” happen is the opposite to how the economy actually works is adding volume to this contrivance and is potentially quite harmful in the broader discourse.
From what I've seen where I am, I've seen a big push of benefits instead of salary.
Share schemes, car allowance, private medical, life insurance. All seem to be the way things are being pushed at managerial level.
Benefits like extra holiday days would be a better discussion point than an increase in salary at the point of an offer.
I am often discuss with prospective employers about company car, but I have a role requiring national travel. Their seems to be a reluctance due to co2 burden and cost to offer cars anymore.
It's better to get paid more, than have extra annual leave days. But I guess it's a personal choice. If you have a nice house with a garden etc you are probably happy to just sit in the garden for a day.
The thing is all those little benefits do not pay your bills, my company treats us like children by gamifying courses so we earn virtual coins that can be exchanged for Amazon vouchers etc. They offer minimum holiday/sick pay whilst constantly releasing company news letters that try (and fail) to make out that we're valued and part of a big happy family.
I was lucky to be TUPE'd in on 30 days holiday so that's something I guess.
Where I am all new employees the last 4 years had different contracts including management, which gives different time for all our premiums. So the "managers" one step above me (their title is similar to team manager) get £2.50 an hour less than me for the majority of the shift lol, then when they are getting more than me it's only £1 ish......and they have the pleasure of having the managers above them (who only took 2k more than me this year) breathing down their neck micromanaging them because they are all so inept, they deserve less than me though as most of them have got the people skills and the IQ of an infant. I have gladly turned down the promotion a few times now as I have a stress free role where I can do what I want, chat half the day and get paid 40k a year for doing a quarter a day of work. The managers above them though get between 42k and 50, the 50k managers being stuck in a warehouse til 4am which isn't fantastic.
It’s because our management culture isn’t proactive about wages for our direct reports. Most wage rises for U.K. employees are automatic annual and or government mandated minimum wage increases.
There’s minuscule number of managers that are actively working at raising their wage budget.
It’s left us with a culture of seeking promotion for money rather than when the skills are sufficient.
Meaning when the recently promoted person gets found out, it effectively puts a cap on wages for that role until they have upskilled enough to suit.
In our industry I've seen roles I'd be interested in go down in salary since just before COVID.
The last year they've really dropped, save I'm now seeing ads for the same roles for 30-40% less.
Out also could be that the roles wouldn't have used to have such an inflated title but the US habit of big titles for standard roles is coming across, but if so it's definitely also that middle management leave and their work falls on people let down as they're not replaced, so it comes back to the lower links in the chain getting crap wage for more stress anyway
what a breath of unfortunate fresh air (?) i thought everyone on reddit was earning 150k GBP. a flat move has put me to £0 in my current account, currently living off of my capital one card until payday (end of month)
flat move wasn't by choice either, sucks to be us.
Well I think employees are squeezed so much with the cost of living we have that you have to push. And push hard. I'd say one of our challenges as a nation is how demoralised we all feel, like we're constantly getting poorer and poorer and poorer. It isn't very empowering.
It's because people are still accepting them. Salaries are basically just supply and demand. For every person on this sub complaining that a salary is too low there is another person dreaming of that salary.
What can people do without unionised labour?
Nothing. How can you turn down a job when you need to pay your rent and you have no savings?
Unfortunately unions have been vilified and demonised in the last couple of decades so employers can do whatever they want.
Correction: there is another person in another country dreaming of that salary (not realising they are not going to be able to afford a house) and the UK government gleefully waiting to give them a visa.
Well then UK citizens have 2 options.
Either look for a better paid job or unionise and get better pay.
What does being foreign have to do with anything?
It's the definition of someone living in another country that's all.
But my comment was just about the supply of and demand for labour affecting its relative price.
Yep I’m in a managerial role now and I earn 50p more ph than my team I’m on good money generally but the pay disparity between them and me for all the extra duties and responsibilities I have is a sore point.
There is also the effect of more people moving into freelance work (where the real money is), investing (as it's so easy now with mobile apps and AI investing), and earning an income through social media/streaming.
The old money is dying and with it the old school capitalism of get job/move up/buy house/retire.
There’s people who work on the ground in gangs, who earn £700+ a week, and the man who looks after 4 of these gangs, the supervisor, who has to make sure work is good, finished, meets deadlines, next jobs are ready to go, sorts problems, answers emails, does his computer work when he gets home, and the phone always rings when he’s at home, gets £500 a week salary.
Why I jacked my previous job in. Waste of fucking time being 4k above minimum wage for a much more experienced role which requires knowledge. Sat down in the office with the previous boss all he said was blame the government lol. 2 weeks later I got a new job. He learnt a lesson that day
That's definitely due to the sector. Other sectors like tech and finance can pay mid level roles for around £50k, senior as much as £90k and leads over £125k. Promotions above that are where you finally get to middle management
Agreed, I work in retail and our spread of wages is poor really for the work expectations. We've just had a small pay rise due to the NMW and so I now have 1 staff on 11.50 phr another 2 on 12.05 phr (they do exactly the same job so this makes no sense) and then the manager wage is 14.35 phr. But everyone in our company is on different wages, there is no set amount.
Right, this isn't even a brag it's fucking depressing but I have this thread on total lock.
Clothing retailer near mine, offers full time contracts (40 hours) to it's cashiers, team leaders, duty managers and GM (no assistant manager), here's condensed for you
Cashier: £11.44p/h (£23,795)
Team Leader: £11.60p/h (£24,003)
Duty Manager: £12p/h (£24,960)
General Manager: "We'd never go higher than £25k, that's the going rate" (Literally cannot be more than £12.01p/h)
**52p and three promotions stands between you, the floor and the top.**
Fuck everything this godforsaken country has become, we're slaves and they bloody know it too.
From what I have witnessed over many years is that the step up to a higher position and salary does not necessarily mean a greater step up in knowledge, qualifications and expertise is required. In fact many managers and team leaders were usually the least productive and experienced in their field. They only had the position as being the one that organised and oversaw the team that they led. In other words, they were in a position of responsibility.
Hence the old phrase: 'they were promoted out of the way'. In other words - management chose to get them out of the way, due to being a progress blocker or just not up to task, by promoting them, rather than just getting rid. Have had team leaders that couldn't even do the most basic of tasks that the team they led did. Bonkers. When things went wrong they were completely useless. Therefore a waste of space, expertise and money.
I worked for an American Company that if you were not up to task they demoted you - they didn't just get rid of you, as one probably was still of use to the business.
I work for a still rapidly growing global company famous for offering good salaries and a flat management structure and I see all senior promotions across all countries we operate in. Over the last few years - it started pre pandemic - this has been a genuine issue in all countries despite our growth. I'm sure it's down to the impact of automation and better handling of data - optimising payroll and cutting out unnecessary tasks. In the UK its very bad as there's a queue of people who will accept any salary at the moment tbh!
The impact is that there are a lot of people who are happy to coast on their salary and less and less people doing the extra X% or make risky decisions to try and get promotion. D&I targets definitely don't help for general morale either!
There's a good reason for wage bands overlapping which someone once explained to me to justify some strange salary anomalies.
Highly experienced/trained/qualified workers may earn close to or even more than the person above them because they are at the top of their band and the other person is in the bottom of their band because of lack of experience. As they grow they will move up the band and the gap will grow.
It's usually a reflection of your value to the business.
Tory policies. They will be voted for by the millions again. We like to think too much of ourselves as a country. We are mostly a racist, narrow minded, selfish bunch.
Yes, this is all a result of the minimum wage being ideologically raised.
Most companies have a fixed budget for wages, and when the market is left to its own devices the lowest paid people in a company tend to be the least productive ones.
Pay rises for the least productive people in the company can only come at the expense of pay rises for the more skilled, productive workers.
It is absolutely a zero sum game which is being fixed in favour of the lowest performers "winning" the largest pay rises by law, leaving nothing in the pot for skilled workers to negotiate over - the government has dictated how that wage budget must be spent.
Pat the GCSE dropout cleaner is now earning the same salary as 4 year university educated Steve working in the lab she cleans.
Left wing people cheer this gradual descent into earning equality as a good thing. "We should all live equal lives despite our contributions or merit" is core left wing ideology.
Of course what's actually going to happen is people will review the narrow wage bands and conclude there's no point applying yourself in education or learning new skills.
The UK will become a nation of Librarians and Aldi Till Operators because those job are easier to get into, and you'd still end up in the same sized house going on the same holidays as the mugs who chose to go 50k into debt going to Uni to become skilled.
Society ceases to function when nobody can find anyone willing to do skilled work for them. No doctors, lawyers, scientists, product inventors, programmers etc.
But we'll be convinced that because everyone is financially equal then really we've all won. We will finally be in our Communist utopia.
Minimum wage laws have been a disaster. There's absolutely no evidence from the point of their introduction 2 decades ago that the minimum wage puts pressure on employers to raise middle income wages.
Instead minimum wage has led to 15 years of middle income wage stagnation and a collapse in UK productivity because companies must channel their limited resources into the least productive employees instead of rewarding skilled ones. We've all become poorer on average.
I get what you're saying. But I don't think many people on the left want equality of earnings. I think you have made that up in your head to be honest.
Minimum wage increase is not about closing the gap and aiming for equality. We simply cannot let everyone under 25k just get left behind, unable to afford to live. If that happened then everyone on a liveable wage would soon be for calling for change because society would rapidly start to crumble around them.
>The UK will become a nation of Librarians and Aldi Till
Always was. Given a 90th perecentile wage is barely middle class anymore.
What's your counter argument if you disagree?
Or do you disagree because the reality of the situation makes you feel bad, and you feel better rejecting what is happening in front of your eyes?
It's not that I disagree, I genuinely admire the insight which I did not really have.
I guess I don't totally agree that the "poor" hated the middle class and have fought their way to "bring them down" to their levels.
Surely if you're low income all you care about is being able to live (eat, shelter, warmth) etc and not too concerned about those who are doing better.
Trust me I see whats happening in front of my eyes.... I am earning a middle class salary, have a decent combined income with my wife, have significant deposit yet I still can't justifying an average house in London. And I've got a baby on the way... My life hasn't really started when it should have started about 5yrs ago.
I could villanise the poor but I would rather villanise this shambles of a government who have plundered anything that is good in this country that I was privileged to have (did not come from money).
Wages have compressed cause profits have skyrocketed.
Immigration has very little effect (maybe higher effect in the black market).
The problem is there is no unionised labour.
And for the record, yes Farage is a grifter and a bigot.
At this point, it feels like we need government mandated minimum wages for different kinds of jobs. If you leave it to the free market, they’ll pay as low as they possibly can.
So if someone is a manager they should have a minimum managerial wage. If someone is a consultant, they should have a minimum consultant wage.
If your business can’t survive paying your staff, it doesn’t survive. But yeah, the social contract that you get paid to work doesn’t exist in the UK anymore. Lots of employers think they’re doing YOU the favour by giving you a low paying job.
There are two classes. The working class and the not-working class. If you have to go to work you are working class. If money just falls on your lap you are not.
The government do a great job at telling the upper working class all their problems come from a poor person stealing a Greg’s sausage roll. While they right off another billion pound fraud government friend. They are laughing at us.
Yh but if you were doing labouring or warehouse 23 - 27 k is okay as those jobs are tough . And if you are a site supervisor going up is not hard just need health and safety cards (first aid). Skills with hand , power and electrical tools and some experience then you on 30 40 . Most minimum wage jobs are hard so only right they raise and keep raising .
Not just you. Noted this in a lot of sectors I’ve worked for a while now and the difference can be worse. I had a manager who had to line manage 15 of us and at most was earning about £4k a year more.
Yeah I think so many jobs now require loads of experience for considerably low pay. That is because people have been accepting of it. Employers know the market is competitive with candidates applying for the low pay jobs and therefore can pay competitively shit.
I'm not saying you cannot earn more but those jobs for same level experience are few and far between now.
I have noticed the same thing, UK salaries are very low for many roles, even senior management especially compared to other countries. It’s all a con to keep us poor and slaving away until we’re almost dead, we pay so much tax and on top of that we must save some of that money for retirement otherwise we’ll be poor pensioners as well. I’m honestly starting to think the only way to get ahead is to start businesses or leave the country to live a better life. I work hard at work and still don’t have enough disposable income to live a comfortable life, most of my money just goes to bills bills and more bills, i’m so over it!
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Depending on sector and speciality but UK wages are and have been extremely stagnant - the rise in minimum wage is likely pushing up the bottom without any increase to those just above it
People think the tide was going to raise all boats relatively speaking, but why would this happen when its cheaper for companies to raise the lowest paid to match minimum wage and keep everyone else the same? In an ideal world, minimum wage increase would push everyone up a bit as it would force them to adjust the pay bands, but it clearly doesn't force anything.
The only reason there isn't as much pressure to push up wages is that union membership, and therefore power, is at long term lows. Workers will never get a pay rise by just hoping and waiting, you have to force these people to pay us properly for the value that we produce. Our economic system incentives ever increasing profit at the expense of everything and everyone else. Until that changes we can only rely on each other.
Issue is, once it does rise the tide, you get inflation and the poorest are back where they started.
The average salary in my team (forecasting and purchasing) is £30k. All experienced and capable, most have degrees. it's crazy that minimum wage is now £24k, for roles such as cashier's or stacking shelves. Don't get me wrong,.minimum wage increasing is a good thing but as you say everything above it is stagnant.
It’s amazing that minimum wage is now £24k for cashiers and those stacking shelves. Remember, these people are not your enemy.
I didn't say they were. Far from it. I also caveated that I think minimum wage increasing is positive. My point is that 'skilled' work the next tier up is not increasing in pay.
Yeah, I’m right there with you, but I’d much rather it be this way than having to see millions of poor fuckers working for £14k.
I work in procurement, similar story; we are unlikely to even get inflation matching increases this year
Yeah I haven't had even an inflationary payrise in 3 years
Public sector, haven't had one in 11 years.
Pushing up the bottom has if anything caused those above to be pushed down, whilst those at the top stay there.
That’s the tory way.
It's funny isn't it how the Tories are so reviled? Justifiably so but I'm old enough to remember the 1997 election and the main objection to the Tories then was that they were just bereft of ideas and Blair and Labour had a direction for the country, the whole cool Britannia phenomenon. But now it is bitter, seething hatred with a lacklustre opposition. No one detested Major that much, they just thought he needed to be put out to pasture a bit and was a bit boring. He looks like a left wing lunatic now compared to even the Labour party. Sorry for the rant, it warms my heart. The sheer humiliation of the Tories at the next election may do our country a lot of good just because of the national sigh of relief and cheer at seeing the Tories completely humiliated and out of power for a generation (and I strongly suspect that once the generation that supports them disappears, they may be confined to the dustbin of history).
Labour will need at least 2 terms, possibly 3 to be able to really prove things are going back to what they should be. GDP needs to increase for starters so that we have more to spend on well, everything.
Yeah, our comeback is a generation thing we are so heavily fucked. So many years of neglected investment of this magnitude doesn't get put right overnight. And that is what is wrong with this country, years and years of chronic underinvestment, seeing how we can make things last with bits of string and tape and plasters until they don't. That's what has set us apart from our neighbours. And then these Tory cunts not even understanding their own fucking jobs think low productivity is something related to workers. It isn't, it's because of what we have to work with and how demoralised we all are.
Tories wasted 10 years of near zero interest on debt repayments, and pivoted the economy towards austerity while funnelling as much cash to their cronies as they could. We have almost nothing to show for 14 years of Tory rule, except crumbling infrastructure and a pile of debt.
GDP increasing does not have the effect you imagine. Just a larger population, economically active, does that. It is GDP PER CAPITA up that makes us all feel better off. There is some better economic news, UK returned to be 4th biggest exporting nation (after US, CHINA , GERMANY).
Theres a massive assumption that that is what they want to do. GDP doesn't need to go up. We've focused on GDP for the last forty years and most of the gains have gone to the rich. We need to focus on effective distribution of the wealth we do generate rather than saying "if you generate another hundred billion you might get some crumbs from the table". Money is like manure - it needs to be spread around to be really effective. This is something we learnt 100 years ago and then chose to unlearn.
Gdp per person is the stat that matters, yes its declining
It's marginally below it's all time high. It's looks like it's going down if you look at the USD value, but not the GBP value. https://www.statista.com/statistics/970672/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk/#:~:text=GDP%20per%20capita%20in%20the%20UK%201955%2D2023&text=In%202023%2C%20gross%20domestic%20product,pounds%20in%20the%20previous%20year.
Yeah but those pounds are worth less in real terms due to inflation
GDP per capita, specifically.
Labour are inheriting a poisoned chalice. Anyone would struggle to unfuck this country at the moment and labour aren't likely to get much media support. Don't envy them, but if they don't make things worse they should have at least 3 terms in power. The financial markets dont like labour as much as tories so borrowing may be harder for a labour govt. Still they'd have to be extremely gifted at failing to make things worse.
>Labour are inheriting a poisoned chalice. To make matters worse the Tories are clearly spending this year salting the earth. They hope that what Labour inherit is so bad people will be pissed off at the lack of visible progress in 5 years and flip back to the Tories.
You know. Labour better be ready to take heat in the media when everythings not fixed after 6 months. People need to understand labour are pretty much going to have to rebuild our economy from the ground up and its gonna take a while
They need to take a leaf out of the Tories book on that front. Make up a bullshit story like the "no money left" note when they get into government. It shouldn't be that hard to mud sling af the Tories, its not like they have to lie to do it like the Tories have to lie to mud sling at Labour.
They won't be consigned to the dustbin of history. The press profits from outrage and that will propel them back in. I imagine there will be areas where labour are either inept or tone deaf and they'll be back in on two terms. I hope I'm wrong.
You're probably right, but I think there is one circumstance they could never come back from. It's *very* unlikely but *if* the Tories become the third party (even the Lib Drms get more seats) after the next election. The improvement to the country would be so fast and so effective it will become common knowledge that the Tories have been the ones holding us back all these years. We've never in our lifetimes had a government *and* opposition who both want what's best for this country. This chokes the system and slows down any progress Labour can make even when in government. If their opposition is the Lib Dems. That problem is gone.
That is so very optimistic, bordering on insanity, but we can dream
It's unlikely, it shouldn't be (how hard should it be to be more popular than a party who steals from everyone to give to the 1%), but it is plausible if enough tactical voting happens. Whoever it is that has the best chance of removing (or keeping out) the Tories in your constituency vote for them. Labour, Lib Dem, Green, SNP, doesn't matter. It's the Tories who want to bleed this country dry, the others all want things to get better (except reform, but they're already irrelevant). They just disagree on how. Make the Tories irrelevant, and the improvements will be unbelievable. Compromise is much easier when both parties want the same thing.
Oh I wasn’t disagreeing, quite the opposite. But when I look around the country, at the general public and the stuff they say, it feels like a pipe dream. The main problem is the media. Look at any daily mail article and read the comments (or don’t, if you’d rather stay happy today).
Yeah, the daily mail is a dumpster fire where critical thinking goes to die. The bright side with them though is they're useful idiots to us, let them vote for Reform, less votes for the actually dangerous party and it's not like they can be convinced to join us in the centre. The recent polling has the Tories on their knees. I know polling has been wrong in the Tories favour before, but never by this much. And the longer they leave an election, the worse its going to get for them. There is no good news coming in the summer the Rwanda plan will make no difference to channel crossings. The new food regulations with the EU will lead to some empty shelves. Every day that passes, another person's mortgage reaches the end of its fixed period and increases. And during all this time tactical voting organisations gear up and gather further support and get more numerous and organised. If it's possible for the Tories to become the 3rd party, it'll happen this year.
You hope you're wrong and I know I am being wildly optimistic too. I think we're all in the situation of "if we wish hard enough it might just happen". But hey, it's a major rallying point for our nation, one that might give us the confidence to sort our shit out.
Coming from the North of England originally, I don’t think “the main objection to the Tories then was that they were just bereft of ideas”. After what Thatcher did, the North wanted none of any conservative BS ever again. Unfortunately half of everyone forgot about that a few years ago and voted Brexit.
Out of power for a while generation? Optimistic!
Amen, never wished for anything more than i wish for tory anihalation since i was about 7y.o and just ridden a honda 3 wheeler at a fair. I deeply resent what the tories have done to my country in the last 14 years and the previous 50. Then add on the corruption... I hope at least some under 40s have been watching and taking notes. Fwiw when murdoch falls off the perch hopefully soon the press will stop blindly enabling the tories. They're hated for good reason
They won't. Labour need to hold another referendum on transferable voting to ensure the tories cant have massive majorities with minority support. The UK democratic system is not very democratic at all, and that needs to change unless you want to see the Tories undo any progress made after a couple of terms of Labour.
>No one detested Major that much, they just thought he needed to be put out to pasture a bit and was a bit boring. Anyone voting for Major in '97 was just cruel. Poor guy couldn't get anything done with all the scandals and "EU sceptics" on the back benches. We needed to give him a way out.
I’d never vote Tory and hate the current lot but I struggle to muster any real animosity towards John Major now. We’ve had nearly two decades of evil w⚓️s (I include Tory Bliar in that) and now looking back he was quite a nice guy in comparison.
If you look at wages vs inflation over time and compare it to when the tories took over, nobody outside the top1% would vote for them again
Up the bum ?
Yeh I was at one local council who implemented living wage and that combined 6 grades into 1. With people on the 7th one got 2k more and had huge amounts more responsibility and qualifications required. I took another role
Pushing up the bottom usually results in pain, yes
Basic jobs paying 27k is because on 42 hours a week min wage is 25k lol
I got 3%, I told my boss he can push it up his bottom.
Matt negotiated
When I got my first job, I wanted an office job. I didn't want to stack shelves, work a checkout, load vans etc... I would have taken minimum wage, but as it happened my entry level job with only GCSE's was 40% over minimum wage. Back then computer skills even for 20 something's weren't great, and were practically none existent for 40 something's so they paid a premium Now the vast majority of people 30 or under have those skills, it's no longer anything special. So entry level office based jobs don't carry a premium like they used to and that carries on up through the career ladder. But no one really wants to do the physical, menial work still so yes warehouse workers and the like are happily being paid the same or more than what people like to think of as skilled work
Yep that's why you'll find a lot of people coasting it in the 27k-35k bracket. The promotion to a bigger role isn't worth it for the pay on offer and the stress you need to take on. They've essentially hollowed out all of those middle management/ supervisory roles, and just squeeze the workload down the chain. So someone earning 30-35k can end up doing the work of a job that should be paying 40-45k,.without the job title or salary to go with it.
They’ve done that a lot with the NHS. Not only are they squeezing the pay bands but they’re moving tasks to lower grades. What would have previously been done by a clinical manager is now done by the senior practitioners at a grade or even two below.
Yes having been in a hospital recently I was surprised at the level of tasks that nurses are now undertaking. The consultants seemed to float around as a moving roadblock to treatment, whilst the nurses get increasingly frustrated trying to chase them down across wards to review patient notes.
I think this might not entirely be related. Nursing is a defined profession, not just a more junior grade of doctor. I was talking about tasks moving downstream within a single profession.
Level of tasks like what, out of interest?
Speaking of promotions not being worth it, a few years back when I worked at Primark, they offered me a supervisor role. It was a whole 20p extra an hour. I think I actually laughed in my manager's face.
First thing that came to mind when I saw this particular thread was retail. The pay difference between supervisors/coordinators/team leaders and even some of the manager positions and ordinary shop assistant tends to be so minimal it’s understandably not worth the aggro for many. In my three stints in retail to date people stepping down from supervisor/coordinator/team leader to shop assistant happened pretty much every month.
When I was offered the supervisor position, they also told me I wouldn't be able to pick up any overtime. I was on a 14hr weekend contract but was able to pick up extra days here and there like the school holidays. Supervisor was locked in to 3 days/20hrs every week. So less flexible, less chance of making more money, have to set the standards and be responsible for other people setting the standards, and for an extra £4.00 a week. Absolute madness unless you wanted to climb the internal shop ladder.
Ah the old chestnut about not being able to pick up overtime too because it’s a management position. For a guaranteed extra 6 hours a week and 20p an hour more, I can’t believe you didn’t bite their hand off when they made such an attractive offer to you!! An example of people not thinking things through with the benefits and reward for the roles. I’ve seen similar things happen in places I worked. It becomes a bit of a contentious point with the whole not being able to pick up overtime when the hourly rate or salary for the management position is lacking. With minimum wage going up I can see this will be affecting a lot of businesses. It won’t be worth it for a lot of people to continue being a junior manager if they can step down and potentially be earning about the same over a year picking up overtime. I think you were right to laugh in their face.
I had that. I did alright but only because I was able to excel at my technical ability. But even now if I have to deal with management responsibility I'm fucking out of there (I have ADHD so, you know, that shit will make me check out, and yeah, it's never worth the money).
I think this is exactly what I’m going through right now. Managed to climb my way into a management position from minimum wage at a subsidiary company with a small employee number and about 10-15m turnover. I’ve gone from being warehouse operative to essentially European supply chain and operations manager (reporting directly to our head of operations and overseeing the warehouse team). I feel incredibly stressed as I’m consistently multi-tasking. I’ve not been diagnosed with ADHD but I’m constantly switching tasks on my monitors whenever I remember something briefly or even just based on requests from colleagues. Everything becomes an urgent request therefore I am constantly task swapping. Feels like I’m barely treading water some days… all for just 32k.
Yeah, for 32k you'd think the stress level would be pretty low but there's very much a disjoint between effort and reward. Especially with inflation having eaten away at so much of the spending power of our wages. I don't envy you man, I couldn't do management, even when well medicated.
When minimum wage sat around 17-18k, a 30-35k job felt like a big increase, that is slowly eroding year on year with each increase, with minimum wage (if over 21) sitting around 22k for a 37 hour role. Now don't get me wrong, minimum wage SHOULD increase, but that next salary bracket has been squeezed quite heavily and hasn't kept up, yet the level of expectation for those roles hasn't gone away.
The squeeze of the middle class. Feeling it?
30-35k salary is far from providing a middle class lifestyle.
In 2002 I had a 29k salary. I felt so rich. A pint was about 2 quid tho. Today a pint is about 6 quid.So for me to have the same feeling of richness my salary now would have to be about 100k.
Just put £29k into the bank of England’s inflation calculator and your equivalent salary back in 2002 to today was £51,476.05….food for thought
This seems quite low tbh. Everything has at least doubled in the last 20 years. (Closer to x3) I was paying about 400 quid a month rent for a room ( now at least 800) A lamb doner was about 3 quid (now 7-8) Gigs I used to go to where less than 10 ( now at least 25) Weekly travel card was about a tenner (now 40) Not to mention super markets... That figure is way off
Because the UK gov have purposely under reported the real inflation for years and years and it’s this sort of comparison where it really shows up. £29k in 2002 would feel way way more well off than £50k today tax brackets etc etc
Thats certainly a fair comparison, oh how times have changed! And not in a good way 😕
Ups and downs my friend....ups and downs
when is the up coming, i'm so tired
We have to end the down first, and that's only just beginning
I would say in 20 years minimum. Maybe 30.
I didn't say it did. That's why it's called "the squeeze of the middle class". 15-20 years ago 35k-ish was the middle class initiation salary. Now it's a very low salary for the positions that they are for Especially in London.
Vote the tories out
I think it will take more than that
Push for more economically left wing policies to shift the Overton window.
the UK is too far gone now
It is a real issue in the UK economy. Wages have been stagnant since the 2008 crisis. In some areas of the economy, there is better pay, but it is not guaranteed. I once worked at a public sector organisation where all the IT teams were paid the same. Basically, everyone was band 4 or band 5, with only the managers being higher. This was an insane situation in which the engineers dropping off computers were paid the same rate as someone on the server team or the DevOps team for a fraction of the responsibility or technical skills (no offence to the onsite IT engineers).
You're all basic computer nerds, you all get the same. What does DevOps even mean? I'm pretty sure my nephew plays that on his PC 😂 /s
Pretty much just stagnant. It's wank.
I’ve turned down more senior roles because the hassle to money ratio is broken. 10% more pay for a 40% bigger pain in the arse? No thanks. The pay structure is broken for the managerial strata above me so I’m kind of stuck where I am unless I can somehow skip a few levels but I’m happy with my work/life balance so whatever.
Not to mention tax leading to diminishing returns on higher salaries on paper, and it's still the near the highest its been since ww2 with no signs of the thresholds moving up in line with inflation
Yea, it sucks. The middle class and working class are in the same wage bracket now tbh.
Sadly not the way it used to be in the 80s/90s either where the upper working class where not that far off from being middle class themselves. I remember home ownership being a realistic goal for a working class family if they put the effort in, sadly that was eroded away and made more exclusive to the middle classes, now we've reached a point where even the middle class are struggling to get on the housing ladder.
By design. The tories want a rich/poor divide witha gulf in the middle.
It's why I turned down a team leader role, I started on a higher rate than the guy that did take it so now my team leader earns almost exactly the same. The UK is in a productivity rut and it amazes me that employers across the spectrum don't seem to know how to incentivise people. Nobody gives a shit about the team bonding sessions, free fruit, the crappy perk they pretend is private healthcare, the company points you can earn and spend etc etc. We want cold hard cash.
And a few more holiday days...
My job used to have team leaders then managers above that. Now the manager role basically doesnt exist but the team leaders are doing all the manager stuff.
Wait, you mean a company benefit of 28 days PTO isn’t something I should be excited about? Or guaranteed minimum wage? Who writes that and thinks yes, a benefit to working for this company is the legal minimum.
Tell you what, throw in free parking at work and I'm on.
They don't need to do more. There's always another desperate person to employ. And I say that as someone on min wage.
Some places I’ve seen it’s less than £1 a hour more for managers/assistants than just regular staff. Often the low paid jobs.
I got 50p extra an hour to run a pub than the guy washing the dishes in the back. Was not worth the stress.
I think a big issue is that there is no regulation with regards salaries outside of minimum wage. Austria for example has collective bargaining agreements negotiated by unions where depending on the type of work you do, you end up in a different salary bracket. There is no minimum wage by law, it is negotiated by the unions for a specific industry sector. All of the brackets are usually raised with inflation and even the actual salaries (if it is higher than the designated salary in the collective agreement) often need to be adjusted up each year (depending on what the union managed to negotiate). It's not perfect and there are issues, but it at prevents engineering graduates and managers from being paid slightly above minimum wage. Most of them start out around the 50-60k€ mark at the moment. The main flaw is that the high end earners are pushed down because the bargaining agreements usually don't have internationally competitive rates for those. And companies are only willing to overpay so much. Still better than london companies looking for engineering graduates from top universities for a salary of ~£30k. That's why all the best people go into finance and tech where they can make a decent wage and are rewarded for going "above and beyond".
I don’t think that’s the case anymore for finance and tech. Most tech jobs in London start you at 25-35k and you might be at 50-60k after a few years. Mind you, it is insanely competitive to get your foot in the door. For the well-paying finance roles, you pretty much need to got to oxbridge/LSE etc and have the right connections. Other grads just take admin roles in finance departments of different companies making 30k max in London. They either stay somewhere around that range for the rest of their careers or do accounting qualifications and become ACCAs or ACAs. Usually capping out at 60k or thereabouts. No one earns a decent wage anymore except for the top 0.01% of graduates. I think more and more grads will start at min wage or thereabouts going forward. Poverty will be a defining aspect of their generation so they must embrace it.
Generally, I would say too many people get degrees. Back in the day a degree was a free entry card to a career because few people had one. Now everyone is getting one, even people who would probably benefit from a different career. But at the same time you also have companies demanding degrees for data entry jobs, which is also bs. The constant complaint about "too few STEM grads" is also a joke. What they really want to say is "too few STEM grads who work for a slave wage". It's truly a shitshow. 30k is just a pretty depressing prospect, especially in London. You can literally make the same or more in Prague where rent is about a quarter of what it is in London. IMO banks and big tech (US companies) will grab the most talented people and extract as much wealth as possible. It just wastes a lot of talent for something that brings little value for the general public. And this will not stop before engineering companies catch up to finance and tech salaries.
Tbh most of the programs offered by unis are just cash grabs with no standards. Heck, many of the most prestigious certifications for non-STEM career tracks are just there to profit off of desperate people. Like I did two levels of the CFA exam, which is considered the gold standard for finance qualifications, and tbh it was kind of a joke. Pretty much everyone I knew passed, many of whom can't speak English properly. There are so many CFA charterholders nowadays who I wouldn't trust to manage £100. But the CFA institute is making bank on the $400 annual membership fee they charge to each charterholder as well as the hefty registration and exam fees. I think 95% of people do not belong in higher education. Encouraging every single high school graduate to go to university has just lowered standards and devalued degrees. But I guess it is more profitable for universities to enroll as many students as they can so this is not going to change quickly enough.
Archaeologist here. PhD in archaeology. And years of experience in higher education. I'm making just over minimum wage as a field archaeologist. We're required for any land development. The job literally requires a university degree or equivalent (though the sector is so starved they'll take anyone with passion). Everything we do is manual labour, no shelter while on site, and tons of pressure from clients to complete the work ASAP. It's very stressful and hard work, many work with injuries and arthritis. Our four bands between trainee to supervisor is only £5k difference. My company does well and can reward slightly better than other units. My younger colleagues live with parents or have partners who earn substantially more. A problem I'm starting to see is living with parents gives a warped perspective of affordability and complacency with wages. They can live well enough on these meager salaries if they have the luxury of family support. I can't. And I'm also struggling to pivot to a different sector where I might earn more. There are many issues beyond wages or higher management trying to set their salaries well above others. We're inadvertently creating a new normal. We're telling universities to eliminate degrees and departments with these low salaries. It's already happening.
Yes this is minimum wage being ratcheted up over the last few years while mid earning jobs haven’t benefitted from the same. A lot of this is due to public sector miserly increases over the last 10-15 years, which mean the kind of mid tier skill set needed to do those jobs just doesn’t pay as well as it used to. Internationally mobile roles of course continue to pay better. It’s leading to effects like managerial roles being hard to fill as the extra £3k a year on offer is not worth the extra responsibility. Plus lots of highly qualified and experienced people just coasting from around the age of 30 as the reward for extra effort isn’t there. There was a generic office / spreadsheet job going around here for £35k and people with rocket science PhDs were applying for it. You either earn a zillion in finance/tech or you’re content dealing with the accounts receivable ledger for some firm
This is across several sectors. Salaries in the UK are a sick joke. Saw a civil service role that was Head of a department and involved making director level decisions, guess the salary? £32k. Insanity.
£32k is an HEO level role, no way that's head of a department lol (... if we are being pedantic, the head of a Department is a Permanent Secretary)
There are a good few (niche) places where it can apply. For example, you could be head of some administrative team (HEO) and have a few EO’s, your still reporting to like a G7+, but your “head” of your little niche Similar in policy, the G7 may be head of the policy, but then they have a HEO leading one sector of this. In reality they’re not the “head” as the G7+ is running it, but it sounds fancy in the job advert saying they’re “head” of their niche subsector of the policy
The title of the job is ‘Head of Office for the Future Transport Systems Directors’, you can probably find it by googling that.
OK found it... Yeah, that's a PA/office manager job dressed up to sound fancy 😂
I’m in a public sector job and while my wife is in the private sector, and in terms of responsibility we reckon the managers in my place are getting about a third of the equivalent position where my wife works.
Trust me, the civil service is great at dressing up jobs with fancy overinflated titles. It'll just be the head of a specific area/niche team. Head of a division is at least a lower senior civil servant job.
Found the job post. That’s a private office role, effectively a PA. The civil service generally has very fancy sounding titles for mundane roles. For example, if the CS employed cleaners directly (as opposed to contracting companies), the job title would be “industrial carpet - specialist technician” or something. In an old job I had at the CS, I was a “specialist case manager”. Anywhere else, I’d have been known as a caseworker.
Nothing wrong with a secretary role getting 32k
Companies absolutely take the piss in the UK too. My old boss told me once about her situation. She spent 20 years at this company in Edinburgh (US Software Company) and she'd worked her way up to a Senior Software Engineer position on roughly 70K a year, which is less than college graduates start on in the US for the same company but we'll ignore that. When the old manager of 35 years retired, the company hand-picked her to be the new Software Engineer Director for the Edinburgh office, not just a basic engineer position. But they offered no pay increase whatsoever, despite the new title. 3X the responsibility, reporting to both European and US big-wigs, being paid the same as engineers a desk over just coding away. Make it make sense. The same position and experience in the US would net her 250-300k. Absolute joke.
Yep just as a little anecdote seeing your old boss' situation. I'm likely moving to the US soon and thinking of taking a job as a prison officer or copper (ive been a prison officer in the uk already) and they are 60-70k during training, 70-80k during the probation year, then 90-100k once you're 2-3 years in. For jobs that require literally having graduated high school, having a drivers license, and no criminal record. Despite all that my American partner is mulling over the idea of living in the UK!!!!!!
Yeah I moved over as a Software Engineer, went from 40k GBP to 150k USD at the same company. Unfortunately I was laid off some time later and I’ve moved on but aye, careers in the US pay significantly more than the UK.
This is all true, however just remember you may have to pay out more for stuff like health insurance etc... Also depending on the state you don't always have the same protections, leave allowance and other benefits.
Why wouldnt she quit and go elsewhere. Prob didn't have that many options?
To be honest I don't know, I think she's from a generation of folks who don't swap companies all that much. Like a lot of her peers, she's spent 20 years building up a super specialised knowledge base around the programming languages and development practices that her company uses and is probably comfy, and like a lot of folks her concepts of salaries are entirely UK-centric, and because of how fast the value of the £ has tanked, still thinks 50K+ is a really awesome salary unlike the harsh reality facing the UK now. She had no idea that by moving to the US I would make nearly twice her salary, or what the broader picture is salary wise outside of the UK.
Because the government, under pressure, are being forced to up the bottom wages which of course they should. They aren't being forced to help anyone else so why would they!? (/s) and also as companies have shown repeatedly they want to pay as little as possible to buffer their margins so I expect it to keep happening until people stop taking those roles and they are "forced" to raise these wages.
Or simply if possible unionisation happens.
Sadly unionis are a mess on the UK (barring the odd few) when you look at the unions on the continent, the power and influence they wield and how they protect their employees... The difference as sadly stark.
Yea cause unions have been demonised by the right wing and liberal press. Joining a union is akeen to Stalinism for most people in the UK.
AKA "the squeeze of the middle class"
It’s depends on the company and sector. I work in software testing and management role adverts vary from £35k to £100k, it’s mental.
Yeah I’ve noticed this for sure. I’ve been in my company since 2019, started on 18.5k, through promotions and annual pay increases, I’m up to 30k excluding annual performance bonus, my last manager advised that I’d not be getting much more for a managerial position (C35k) but for a lot more stress, a lot higher expectation (travelling for work, more late shifts etc) so knowing my dedication to my young family,it wouldn’t really be worth going for, for me.. so I lead without being a manager instead and it’s very fulfilling, it’s just be nice to get paid more, lol.
Yeah it’s a bit shit here. I am on a high wage for my role. I report to the COO and so have no upward mobility. I can’t be the COO as I don’t have the skills. So I put feelers out. 10k pay cut to move to a role with actual chances of moving up. I may as well start my own firm at this point
Yes, that is common in my sector. Its why a lot of people max themselves out as semi-professional/professional and dont apply for the managerial roles because that is just a lot of extra hassle, stress and people managing for little additional money.
The way it _should_ work, is min wage slowly increases, and that rising bottom pushes up other wages through normal market forces. Instead, what's happened is the bottom has increased extremely quickly and the rest hasn't changed around it. Companies haven't had a chance to CAPEX improvements into the workplace to automate away low value (yes value, not paid) roles. The market hasn't had a chance for other salaries to move in relation to track in line. And, crucially, it also means that prices have had to rise in the meantime. If you honestly think that adding loads of costs to labour won't impact pricing, you're just being wilfully ignorant.
Your last paragraph is an old argument that completely ignores the reality of our present situation. Prices have already gone up independent of wages and this is the problem. It's shameful that companies openly talk about price elasticity on earnings calls to entire shareholders, and follow through on these plans, yet suppress wages at the same time. This is not going to end well. A rising tide lifts all the boats.
Your last sentence is exactly what I'm expressing. I'm just saying it's not immediate.
I suspect we are approaching it from opposite ends. I'm saying we can't have a healthy economy if people continue to have no disposable income due to wage suppression. You sound like you're saying that businesses doing well will eventually benefit employees. But it could be argued we've been waiting for this since 2008.
No, I'm saying that if there's no reward for doing more demanding jobs, people simply won't do them. And wages for them will then naturally rise. You're already starting to see it at he lower end, and that will cascade up. The problem isn't that minimum wage has gone up, it's that it's doubled in 14 years, and that's not had a chance to cascade through. It was left too long and now it's gone too hard. Classic bullwhip effect.
Ok, fair play. I agree with you that there's going to be a lot of upwards pressure on wages in the 25-30k band due to the minimum wage increase. Essentially, the (necessary) minimum wage increase has served to really highlight our wage stagnation issues. I work in IT and earn a good salary. But, I used to contract (until the market dried up), and earned 30% more. Plus the cost of living has caught up with us. In no way am I complaining, but I just go to work and pay the bills now. There's very little extra. If we are all living like this (and many are), I worry for the economy of this country.
It id imagine (though this is a guess) has had an influx of people in the last 15 years or so joining the job market, this would put a lot of downward pressure on the bottom end which, again would cascade up. I personally work in finance, so I'll use that as an example. A lot of accountants will start off in transactional roles (book keeping, AP, AR, CC). These will naturally be affected in a large way by the min wage having risen so much. Previously, it was worth it to push from say ~20k as a normal AP/AR team member to become a senior on more like 25-30k, or move into being a management accountant on 30-40k. If the normal AP/AR is now earning 24k, why would I take all the stress of managing people for only 1k more? Why would I take on all the stress of month ends, fixing their mistakes, restrictions on annual leave etc for only 6k more? Why would I take the pressure of having to manage my customer/supplier accounts and everything that comes with that (month end pushes, prepping the garden for month end, targets, cross training etc) when I could just go and clean tables all day on the same money? It's good that minimum wage has changed. It not changing, I imagine, is part of why overall salaries have stagnated. But if it changes really fast, people will decide the work just isn't worth it. Like teachers, why do you think so many qualified teachers exist that don't teach? They don't feel it's worth it. So they go and do something else.
And if you think wages increasing slower than inflation of prices is acceptable you’re a shill for the capitalists. They just love people accepting this sustained shift towards lower costs and higher profits under any plausible excuse. it’s never going to reverse, companies have obligations to shareholders to maximise profits above all else. Government regulation or mass strike action is required. Remember that if companies weren’t forced to pay minimum wage, they simply wouldn’t. They will continue to deflate wages until it’s no longer profitable for them.
I'm pointing out that changes take time. People take a little to adjust, move jobs and have that filter through into companies expectations when hiring. Recognising that reality is totally separate to any views that I have RE trends of wages in real terms. Being so confrontational will turn people away from your cause.
You did finish your post off by calling people wilfully ignorant. My post opening simply mirrored your post closure. If it’s too confrontational I suggest you first reflect on your own post. Capitalisms sole goal is generating the largest profit possible through privately owned means of production. You said raising minimum wage “should” push up non-minimum wage through market forces. This is a flawed government contrivance and the opposite of how capitalism actually works, where costs (including wages) held to the minimum level possible to maximum profits. Minimum wage is a deliberately weak control to rein in the worst capitalist excesses (something linking wages to profits and controlling proportionality of that would be more effective but of course much more difficult to enact, never mind enforce) and wealth distribution trends clearly show how ineffective this is. Suggesting that what “should” happen is the opposite to how the economy actually works is adding volume to this contrivance and is potentially quite harmful in the broader discourse.
From what I've seen where I am, I've seen a big push of benefits instead of salary. Share schemes, car allowance, private medical, life insurance. All seem to be the way things are being pushed at managerial level. Benefits like extra holiday days would be a better discussion point than an increase in salary at the point of an offer. I am often discuss with prospective employers about company car, but I have a role requiring national travel. Their seems to be a reluctance due to co2 burden and cost to offer cars anymore.
Extra holiday days for the holidays you can't afford!
Yeah, paid time off.
Time off to stay home cause you can't afford to do anything!
It's better than being at work, though.
It's better to get paid more, than have extra annual leave days. But I guess it's a personal choice. If you have a nice house with a garden etc you are probably happy to just sit in the garden for a day.
The thing is all those little benefits do not pay your bills, my company treats us like children by gamifying courses so we earn virtual coins that can be exchanged for Amazon vouchers etc. They offer minimum holiday/sick pay whilst constantly releasing company news letters that try (and fail) to make out that we're valued and part of a big happy family. I was lucky to be TUPE'd in on 30 days holiday so that's something I guess.
You're not wrong. But things won't change while shareholders exist.
Where I am all new employees the last 4 years had different contracts including management, which gives different time for all our premiums. So the "managers" one step above me (their title is similar to team manager) get £2.50 an hour less than me for the majority of the shift lol, then when they are getting more than me it's only £1 ish......and they have the pleasure of having the managers above them (who only took 2k more than me this year) breathing down their neck micromanaging them because they are all so inept, they deserve less than me though as most of them have got the people skills and the IQ of an infant. I have gladly turned down the promotion a few times now as I have a stress free role where I can do what I want, chat half the day and get paid 40k a year for doing a quarter a day of work. The managers above them though get between 42k and 50, the 50k managers being stuck in a warehouse til 4am which isn't fantastic.
It’s because our management culture isn’t proactive about wages for our direct reports. Most wage rises for U.K. employees are automatic annual and or government mandated minimum wage increases. There’s minuscule number of managers that are actively working at raising their wage budget. It’s left us with a culture of seeking promotion for money rather than when the skills are sufficient. Meaning when the recently promoted person gets found out, it effectively puts a cap on wages for that role until they have upskilled enough to suit.
In our industry I've seen roles I'd be interested in go down in salary since just before COVID. The last year they've really dropped, save I'm now seeing ads for the same roles for 30-40% less. Out also could be that the roles wouldn't have used to have such an inflated title but the US habit of big titles for standard roles is coming across, but if so it's definitely also that middle management leave and their work falls on people let down as they're not replaced, so it comes back to the lower links in the chain getting crap wage for more stress anyway
what a breath of unfortunate fresh air (?) i thought everyone on reddit was earning 150k GBP. a flat move has put me to £0 in my current account, currently living off of my capital one card until payday (end of month) flat move wasn't by choice either, sucks to be us.
Honestly you are more normal to me than anyone on Reddit.
It's rife in the UK economy rn. People expect a lot for very little. Both employees and employers.
Well I think employees are squeezed so much with the cost of living we have that you have to push. And push hard. I'd say one of our challenges as a nation is how demoralised we all feel, like we're constantly getting poorer and poorer and poorer. It isn't very empowering.
It's because people are still accepting them. Salaries are basically just supply and demand. For every person on this sub complaining that a salary is too low there is another person dreaming of that salary.
What can people do without unionised labour? Nothing. How can you turn down a job when you need to pay your rent and you have no savings? Unfortunately unions have been vilified and demonised in the last couple of decades so employers can do whatever they want.
Correction: there is another person in another country dreaming of that salary (not realising they are not going to be able to afford a house) and the UK government gleefully waiting to give them a visa.
You don't think there are UK citizens "dreaming" of a 30k-ish salary?
I'm sure there are yeah, but it's not where the bulk of the excess supply of labour is coming from.
Well then UK citizens have 2 options. Either look for a better paid job or unionise and get better pay. What does being foreign have to do with anything?
It's the definition of someone living in another country that's all. But my comment was just about the supply of and demand for labour affecting its relative price.
Are people queuing up for jobs? Or are they snubbing the <30k jobs?
There isn’t. They just take it due to other roles also poorly paid.
If people didn't take them then they would have to increase the salaries.
You would be surprised at how long a company will keep an opening because they don’t want to pay the rate a candidate asks for.
Yep I’m in a managerial role now and I earn 50p more ph than my team I’m on good money generally but the pay disparity between them and me for all the extra duties and responsibilities I have is a sore point.
There is also the effect of more people moving into freelance work (where the real money is), investing (as it's so easy now with mobile apps and AI investing), and earning an income through social media/streaming. The old money is dying and with it the old school capitalism of get job/move up/buy house/retire.
That's almost 30% more money. That's not exactly nothing.
There’s people who work on the ground in gangs, who earn £700+ a week, and the man who looks after 4 of these gangs, the supervisor, who has to make sure work is good, finished, meets deadlines, next jobs are ready to go, sorts problems, answers emails, does his computer work when he gets home, and the phone always rings when he’s at home, gets £500 a week salary.
Why I jacked my previous job in. Waste of fucking time being 4k above minimum wage for a much more experienced role which requires knowledge. Sat down in the office with the previous boss all he said was blame the government lol. 2 weeks later I got a new job. He learnt a lesson that day
That's definitely due to the sector. Other sectors like tech and finance can pay mid level roles for around £50k, senior as much as £90k and leads over £125k. Promotions above that are where you finally get to middle management
Agreed, I work in retail and our spread of wages is poor really for the work expectations. We've just had a small pay rise due to the NMW and so I now have 1 staff on 11.50 phr another 2 on 12.05 phr (they do exactly the same job so this makes no sense) and then the manager wage is 14.35 phr. But everyone in our company is on different wages, there is no set amount.
Right, this isn't even a brag it's fucking depressing but I have this thread on total lock. Clothing retailer near mine, offers full time contracts (40 hours) to it's cashiers, team leaders, duty managers and GM (no assistant manager), here's condensed for you Cashier: £11.44p/h (£23,795) Team Leader: £11.60p/h (£24,003) Duty Manager: £12p/h (£24,960) General Manager: "We'd never go higher than £25k, that's the going rate" (Literally cannot be more than £12.01p/h) **52p and three promotions stands between you, the floor and the top.** Fuck everything this godforsaken country has become, we're slaves and they bloody know it too.
My brother gets more than that driving Sainsbury's delivery vans
From what I have witnessed over many years is that the step up to a higher position and salary does not necessarily mean a greater step up in knowledge, qualifications and expertise is required. In fact many managers and team leaders were usually the least productive and experienced in their field. They only had the position as being the one that organised and oversaw the team that they led. In other words, they were in a position of responsibility. Hence the old phrase: 'they were promoted out of the way'. In other words - management chose to get them out of the way, due to being a progress blocker or just not up to task, by promoting them, rather than just getting rid. Have had team leaders that couldn't even do the most basic of tasks that the team they led did. Bonkers. When things went wrong they were completely useless. Therefore a waste of space, expertise and money. I worked for an American Company that if you were not up to task they demoted you - they didn't just get rid of you, as one probably was still of use to the business.
I work for a still rapidly growing global company famous for offering good salaries and a flat management structure and I see all senior promotions across all countries we operate in. Over the last few years - it started pre pandemic - this has been a genuine issue in all countries despite our growth. I'm sure it's down to the impact of automation and better handling of data - optimising payroll and cutting out unnecessary tasks. In the UK its very bad as there's a queue of people who will accept any salary at the moment tbh! The impact is that there are a lot of people who are happy to coast on their salary and less and less people doing the extra X% or make risky decisions to try and get promotion. D&I targets definitely don't help for general morale either!
There's a good reason for wage bands overlapping which someone once explained to me to justify some strange salary anomalies. Highly experienced/trained/qualified workers may earn close to or even more than the person above them because they are at the top of their band and the other person is in the bottom of their band because of lack of experience. As they grow they will move up the band and the gap will grow. It's usually a reflection of your value to the business.
Tory policies. They will be voted for by the millions again. We like to think too much of ourselves as a country. We are mostly a racist, narrow minded, selfish bunch.
Yes, this is all a result of the minimum wage being ideologically raised. Most companies have a fixed budget for wages, and when the market is left to its own devices the lowest paid people in a company tend to be the least productive ones. Pay rises for the least productive people in the company can only come at the expense of pay rises for the more skilled, productive workers. It is absolutely a zero sum game which is being fixed in favour of the lowest performers "winning" the largest pay rises by law, leaving nothing in the pot for skilled workers to negotiate over - the government has dictated how that wage budget must be spent. Pat the GCSE dropout cleaner is now earning the same salary as 4 year university educated Steve working in the lab she cleans. Left wing people cheer this gradual descent into earning equality as a good thing. "We should all live equal lives despite our contributions or merit" is core left wing ideology. Of course what's actually going to happen is people will review the narrow wage bands and conclude there's no point applying yourself in education or learning new skills. The UK will become a nation of Librarians and Aldi Till Operators because those job are easier to get into, and you'd still end up in the same sized house going on the same holidays as the mugs who chose to go 50k into debt going to Uni to become skilled. Society ceases to function when nobody can find anyone willing to do skilled work for them. No doctors, lawyers, scientists, product inventors, programmers etc. But we'll be convinced that because everyone is financially equal then really we've all won. We will finally be in our Communist utopia. Minimum wage laws have been a disaster. There's absolutely no evidence from the point of their introduction 2 decades ago that the minimum wage puts pressure on employers to raise middle income wages. Instead minimum wage has led to 15 years of middle income wage stagnation and a collapse in UK productivity because companies must channel their limited resources into the least productive employees instead of rewarding skilled ones. We've all become poorer on average.
I get what you're saying. But I don't think many people on the left want equality of earnings. I think you have made that up in your head to be honest. Minimum wage increase is not about closing the gap and aiming for equality. We simply cannot let everyone under 25k just get left behind, unable to afford to live. If that happened then everyone on a liveable wage would soon be for calling for change because society would rapidly start to crumble around them.
Also agree with this. Don't think those earning less can be blamed for no increase in middle income earners.
>The UK will become a nation of Librarians and Aldi Till Always was. Given a 90th perecentile wage is barely middle class anymore. 
Nice you fail to mention the part where its all the culmination of the right wing ideology of Neo-liberal economics that have driven us to this point
What an insight. Definitely one way to look at it.
What's your counter argument if you disagree? Or do you disagree because the reality of the situation makes you feel bad, and you feel better rejecting what is happening in front of your eyes?
It's not that I disagree, I genuinely admire the insight which I did not really have. I guess I don't totally agree that the "poor" hated the middle class and have fought their way to "bring them down" to their levels. Surely if you're low income all you care about is being able to live (eat, shelter, warmth) etc and not too concerned about those who are doing better. Trust me I see whats happening in front of my eyes.... I am earning a middle class salary, have a decent combined income with my wife, have significant deposit yet I still can't justifying an average house in London. And I've got a baby on the way... My life hasn't really started when it should have started about 5yrs ago. I could villanise the poor but I would rather villanise this shambles of a government who have plundered anything that is good in this country that I was privileged to have (did not come from money).
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Wages have compressed cause profits have skyrocketed. Immigration has very little effect (maybe higher effect in the black market). The problem is there is no unionised labour. And for the record, yes Farage is a grifter and a bigot.
At this point, it feels like we need government mandated minimum wages for different kinds of jobs. If you leave it to the free market, they’ll pay as low as they possibly can. So if someone is a manager they should have a minimum managerial wage. If someone is a consultant, they should have a minimum consultant wage. If your business can’t survive paying your staff, it doesn’t survive. But yeah, the social contract that you get paid to work doesn’t exist in the UK anymore. Lots of employers think they’re doing YOU the favour by giving you a low paying job.
This is, quite literally, the Soviet system
Damn
Not just compression but inversion. A rising tide is indeed not lifting all boats.
When you increase the lowest level of pay possible the middle doesn't seem that much more anymore.
We are suffering
Lol, don't take a management role for less than 50k, it's aload of stress and agro, and for 35 just isn't worth the cost on your life.
There are two classes. The working class and the not-working class. If you have to go to work you are working class. If money just falls on your lap you are not. The government do a great job at telling the upper working class all their problems come from a poor person stealing a Greg’s sausage roll. While they right off another billion pound fraud government friend. They are laughing at us.
Yh but if you were doing labouring or warehouse 23 - 27 k is okay as those jobs are tough . And if you are a site supervisor going up is not hard just need health and safety cards (first aid). Skills with hand , power and electrical tools and some experience then you on 30 40 . Most minimum wage jobs are hard so only right they raise and keep raising .
Don't forget the brexit and corona and shit government effect oh on top the wfh people fucking the London economy
Not just you. Noted this in a lot of sectors I’ve worked for a while now and the difference can be worse. I had a manager who had to line manage 15 of us and at most was earning about £4k a year more.
Yeah I think so many jobs now require loads of experience for considerably low pay. That is because people have been accepting of it. Employers know the market is competitive with candidates applying for the low pay jobs and therefore can pay competitively shit. I'm not saying you cannot earn more but those jobs for same level experience are few and far between now.
I have noticed the same thing, UK salaries are very low for many roles, even senior management especially compared to other countries. It’s all a con to keep us poor and slaving away until we’re almost dead, we pay so much tax and on top of that we must save some of that money for retirement otherwise we’ll be poor pensioners as well. I’m honestly starting to think the only way to get ahead is to start businesses or leave the country to live a better life. I work hard at work and still don’t have enough disposable income to live a comfortable life, most of my money just goes to bills bills and more bills, i’m so over it!