Why the baby boomers shouldn't feel guilty

suburbanwifey

Rinoa wrote: »

The minimum wage is clearly too much. For a 16 yo it's about 25% of average earnings. When I started work I got less than 10%.

Does a 16 year old really need £145pw?

I think the minimum wage is too low! Its not a liveable wage for an adult or a 16 yr old, not with the price of utilities, rents, mortgages today. Its only livable if you still live with your parents. Minimum wage living is below the poverty line anywhere in this country.

CLAPTON

suburbanwifey wrote: »

I think the minimum wage is too low! Its not a livable wage for an adult or a 16 yr old, not with the price of utilities, rents, mortgages today. Its only livable if you still live with your parents. Minimum wage living is below the poverty line anywhere in this country.

how many people are you willing to employ at that wage?

ukcarper

ruggedtoast wrote: »

There are a lot of people in their 30s who have worked all their lives, have student loan debts, and can neither afford a house, or will have much of a pension to look forward to.

Those people have enough to contend with supporting their own families, without the added burden of paying for your retirements and endless demands for medical care. If you'd actually left the country with any money rather than a vast deficit there might not be so much ill will towards your generation.

It seems to have escaped the vast majority of moral pundits on this thread, but the recent governments are mostly comprised of baby boomers. The people in charge of the country are baby boomers. The people who have amassed 80% of what is left of our wealth are baby boomers, the people who had free education when we have to pay are baby boomers, the people the baby boomers moan about being on strike in the 70s were largely baby boomers, the people that younger generations now have to mortgage themselves to the eye teeth for their retirements are baby boomers.

My children are in there 30s they are all buying their own properties, as are most of their friends and this is in the southeast.

ukcarper

Graham_Devon wrote: »

It wasn't really the same though was it. At least in the 80's you had council houses. At least jobs were more local.

As I say, so MUCH has changed. Everyone seems to concentrate on one single thing and ignores the rest.

I truely believe the biggest thing thats made todays generation as it is today is the benefits system rewarding having children.

You can't just get a council house any more. You have to get knocked up first.

I think you had to get knocked up in 70s the difference being, that the couple were probably married and living with one of their parents.

suburbanwifey

CLAPTON wrote: »

how many people are you willing to employ at that wage?

I know I wouldn't expect a good weeks work or dedication from them if I paid them peanut wages. You get what you pay for with staff, that's why most people who can only get low-paid jobs feel 'better off' on benefits. Either benefits are too high or minimum wage is too low. Also another reason why so many foreigners fill these positions as our kids won't work for that money. I don't have kids but if I did, I'd want them to get a job paying more than minimum wage else they would never be able to leave home!

I am not an employer so I cannot fairly answer that question you asked me, but I suspect those employers who pay peanuts to their staff reap the rewards with the salaries they take, company cars, flash houses etc. Yet they can't afford to pay a living wage to their staff? its just that they can get away with paying peanuts.

ukcarper

Graham_Devon wrote: »

It wasn't really the same though was it. At least in the 80's you had council houses. At least jobs were more local.

As I say, so MUCH has changed. Everyone seems to concentrate on one single thing and ignores the rest.

I truely believe the biggest thing thats made todays generation as it is today is the benefits system rewarding having children.

You can't just get a council house any more. You have to get knocked up first.

I’m not sure where you get this obsession with council houses yes they were easier to get but not that easy. I was bought up in what would be considered a slum today. No hot water heating bathroom toilet 20 yards up the back garden as my parents didn’t have enough points for a council house until my sister was 5 and we got extra points.

CLAPTON

suburbanwifey wrote: »

I know I wouldn't expect a good weeks work or dedication from them if I paid them peanut wages. You get what you pay for with staff, that's why most people who can only get low-paid jobs feel 'better off' on benefits. Either benefits are too high or minimum wage is too low. Also another reason why so many foreigners fill these positions as our kids won't work for that money. I don't have kids but if I did, I'd want them to get a job paying more than minimum wage else they would never be able to leave home!

I am not an employer so I cannot fairly answer that question you asked me, but I suspect those employers who pay peanuts to their staff reap the rewards with the salaries they take, company cars, flash houses etc. Yet they can't afford to pay a living wage to their staff? its just that they can get away with paying peanuts.

the situation is that there is a shortgage of jobs.

i.e. there are many many people unemployed

I'm sure we would all like to have a sistuation that where everyone earns more than the average wage

However, in the situation we are in, is it better for a young person to work for peanuts but gain experinece and hence enhance their chance of getting a better job or simply rely of benefits?

If it's so easy to be an employer and make lots and lots of money at the expense of paying peanuts to their employers then why aren't there more employers and lower unemployment?

ruggedtoast

Rinoa wrote: »

The minimum wage is clearly too much. For a 16 yo it's about 25% of average earnings. When I started work I got less than 10%.

Does a 16 year old really need £145pw?

That's right, everything should be worse for the new generations than it was for you. That's the boomer ideology as far as I can see.

ash28

Graham_Devon wrote: »

It wasn't really the same though was it. At least in the 80's you had council houses. At least jobs were more local.

As I say, so MUCH has changed. Everyone seems to concentrate on one single thing and ignores the rest.

I truely believe the biggest thing thats made todays generation as it is today is the benefits system rewarding having children.

You can't just get a council house any more. You have to get knocked up first.

But who could get them? Not everyone that wanted one that's for sure and they had started selling them off by then - so it made the supply much smaller. And I agree being pregnant shouldn't be a ticket to a council house.

What jobs were local? Most people got a bus or drove to work - there were very few jobs where you could get up in the morning, fall out of bed and be in work in 5 minutes. Unless you worked in your local corner shop. Living on the doorstep of work changed when out of town suburbs started to built. OH travelled nearly 20 miles each way to work in 1979 and when I was 16 I travelled 15 miles each way by bus. Some people may have been lucky and got jobs in the local town and maybe even lived close enough to walk or have a short bus journey, but for a lot it was pretty much the same as it is now. Some people lived within a few miles of their work and some didn't.

I guess if you go back a lot further people may have been able to walk to work in the days when employers built workers housing - Huntley and Palmers in Reading springs to mind and Great Western in Reading..... My grandfather was a miner and he lived in a miners house in what was a mining village. but he still had to get a bus to the colliery (around 10 miles away) - it was laid on by the NCB. I used to meet him off it as a child when we stayed with them.

I'm from the North East and a few miles away was Wallsend - shipbuilding - and some people who worked in the yards lived in Wallsend but there were fleets of buses laid on to pick people up and take them to the yards and take them home again. They came from all over the area to work. The same for DSS offices in Longbenton on the outskirts of Newcastle - we used to call them the ministry buses - people travelled for miles to go to work. My mother worked in a factory on an industrial estate - they were picked up too.

The means of getting to work may have changed in that a lot of people are able to drive to work when in the past transport to large employers would probably have been provided

Perhaps things were different in the South West.

And you're right a lot has changed. Some changes have been good and some haven't. I agree with you about council housing - though where I'm from they were never easy to get, and made even harder when they started selling them off, I knew people who lived in substandard housing and waited years, we moved to the south east in the mid 1980s (30 miles each way to work for OH) and they were impossible to get there and still are.

As for the benefits system, I don't have strong feeling either way other than I wouldn't like anyone in this country to be absolutely on the breadline and I do think we need to help people when they need it - there but for grace of God etc - I've never received benefits other than child benefit - I know people that have and they have been genuine - out of work for a time etc. My own father had motor neurone disease and had what was invalidity benefit from when he became too ill to work until he died, he or my mother also got attendance allowance - and she did look after him as he became less able to do things for himself - towards the end he could do nothing for himself. I'm not sure how much of what you read in some of the newspapers (I find most of them just a bundle of rubbish) or the rhetoric spouted by the government is true and how much is not. I've learned not to believe either of them.

For me the biggest changes in the last 40 years have been in the actual jobs - we have moved from having a large manufacturing base to what appears to be a large service industry...for ever lower wages and it had been going that way for years - I only really started to notice it in the 1980s. I worked for 3 large manufacterers (none of them British) and one of them moved all of their production overseas in 2000, one moved a large part of their production overseas in 1998 and the third moved a large part of their production overseas in 2006.

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MRSTITTLEMOUSE

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I'm starting to lack sympathy with your posts now.

Just the lack of council housing compared to the babyboomers day has changed the landscape significantly.

There really does need to be some sort of understanding of the massive changes in the landscape compared to two generations before you simply suggest anyone discussing it is simply moaning, or has sour grapes. That doesn't have to be the case. Theres so much that has changed that I feel you wish to simply ignore and cast a generalistation on everyone else due to your own ignorance.

Yes, there certainly is a case that people can do better for themselves. BUT, and this is the important point. It's so much harder to do that now due to the lack of jobs, lack of social housing etc. You surely must understand that?

Its not ignorance.
I'm fully aware of the situation out there.
I'm not some old fuddy duddy with no grasp on reality,I'm 56 for goodness sake.
Having three children of my own who are all home owners (two of them buying alone on one salary) and with some of my grandchildren of an age that they are wanting to move out to go it alone I am well aware of what the world is like out there.
We had a totally different situation to our parents when we started out just as my children did and now their children are finding it different again.
Each generation has to adapt,they can't expect things to remain the same.

As for social housing and jobs.
We could'nt get social housing and neither could a lot of our friends so we had to live in or rent until we could afford to buy.
Some of our friends never bought and they've survived.
Its not compulsory to life to own a home.
Jobs have been scarce at times too,we've had recessions and redundancies like every other generation.
Its no good having a moan at past generations for the benefits they did or did'nt have.
All this silly talk about the baby boomers is ridiculous,they had no control over circumstance.
They found themselves in the situation that the powers that be put them in just as every generation does and need have no guilt about anything.
In this world nobody owes anyone anything,you have to get out there and make things happen yourself.