Minimum Wage To Go Up, Are you negatively effected?

mwpt

princeofpounds wrote: »

One area this is having a real effect is on elderly care - council tax is going to start rising again this year and most of the extra care budget will now go into staff wages. So I (And probably most of us) are going to be taxed more for no extra output.

Care staff are on minimum wage?

ging84

Something i have noticed over the last few weeks is that queues in super markets have been noticeably longer, i am used to basically not having to queue being more than 1 person, 2 at the most any time other than Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The super markets seem to have the technology and staff they need to ensure they always have the exact number of tills open they need to meet demand, but recently in a couple of my local super markets this seems to have changed.

it could of course be purely coincidental, or could be a sign super markets are experimenting with cutting back on staff in advance of the minimum wage rise.

princeofpounds

Care staff are on minimum wage?

Not the nursing types, but a lot of the ancillary staff are now it has risen. And it's a people-intensive business.

vivatifosi

princeofpounds wrote: »

One area this is having a real effect is on elderly care - council tax is going to start rising again this year and most of the extra care budget will now go into staff wages. So I (And probably most of us) are going to be taxed more for no extra output.

This was featured in an article on R4 yesterday. The interviewee said that councils had been allowed to put up council tax by 2% to cover but 90% of that was going on the increase in wages, not the increasing need for carers.

This is a concern for me working in libraries. Most library staff are low paid, rather than librarians etc. If council budgets continue as is, care demands increase at current trend and wages increase in line with proposals, I can see yet more library closures and more use of volunteers. The care juggernaut will win over other services. I hasten to add these are my concerns and are not necessarily the views of my employer, which has done more than many others to address these issues before they arise.

princeofpounds

The care juggernaut will win over other services

The care juggernaut - in its wider sense including medical care and all sorts of elderly services - is going to win over pretty much everything.


It's the big driver (on the spending side) for why the government is having to be so savage in its cuts in pretty much every area except health, pensions (and for this parliament, apparently policing). The amount the government has cut since the coalition initially came to power has been pretty much 1-for-1 wiped out by the ever-increasing ratchet of providing for the elderly.

mwpt

princeofpounds wrote: »

The care juggernaut - in its wider sense including medical care and all sorts of elderly services - is going to win over pretty much everything.


It's the big driver (on the spending side) for why the government is having to be so savage in its cuts in pretty much every area except health, pensions (and for this parliament, apparently policing). The amount the government has cut since the coalition initially came to power has been pretty much 1-for-1 wiped out by the ever-increasing ratchet of providing for the elderly.

Anecdotally, I have previously checked the big pie chart that is occasionally put out depicting government spending. Pensions and welfare spend are huge and seem to increase.

I'm normally optimistic about the future (while being a cynic about humans) but it actually depresses me.

As I say, I'm normally optimistic about the future and the ability of the free market and technology to deliver improvements, but some cracks are starting to show. We seem to be facing some very challenging problems.

princeofpounds

I'm normally optimistic about the future (while being a cynic about humans) but it actually depresses me.

As I say, I'm normally optimistic about the future and the ability of the free market and technology to deliver improvements, but some cracks are starting to show. We seem to be facing some very challenging problems.

Markets and tech will still drive improvements, I have no doubt about that. This is more of a problem of the allocation of resources rather than a reduction of resources (although the rising dependency ratio means that statement might not be true for working-age labour capital).


The problem is that we need to make choices. If we want to care for the elderly in the manner that we have been doing historically, and probably the way we imagine it going, then everything else will have to suffer. Or, if that pushes things too far, then we will have to cut back on how we treat the elderly.


One of the particular problems I can see is that the policy direction has been to preserve benefits and spending for current and near-term elderly, largely at the expense of current and near-term working age people (via higher sovereign debt, higher tax take, raised retirement ages, removal of spending on things like higher education, etc.). Not that all those policies are bad, just that the burden has been entirely concentrated on the generation that has to pay off the cheque the older generation has written itself.


Combine that with a lack of secure tenure on housing, and we aren't quite getting the rate of birth that could stabilise the dependency ratio problem. At the moment this gap is largely being plugged by immigrants and the children of immigrants, which economically-speaking is fine, but obviously means that Britain is going to look very different in 50 years time.

mwpt

princeofpounds wrote: »

Markets and tech will still drive improvements, I have no doubt about that. This is more of a problem of the allocation of resources rather than a reduction of resources (although the rising dependency ratio means that statement might not be true for working-age labour capital).

That is largely my view. I'm optimistic about the future from a technology point of view but pessimistic because of several trends. We are moving back toward increasing inequality in developed nations, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but has serious implications for the taxation system. My opinion is that if this trend increases, the middle class get shifted downward on a relative wealth scale but upward on a taxation scale. We call this the squeezed middle of course. We're going to have to find a way to, as you point out, allocate resources more fairly, probably by higher taxation for the very wealthy (as they increasing diverge) but this faces competitive challenges such as global mobility.

The problem is that we need to make choices. If we want to care for the elderly in the manner that we have been doing historically, and probably the way we imagine it going, then everything else will have to suffer. Or, if that pushes things too far, then we will have to cut back on how we treat the elderly.

One of the particular problems I can see is that the policy direction has been to preserve benefits and spending for current and near-term elderly, largely at the expense of current and near-term working age people (via higher sovereign debt, higher tax take, raised retirement ages, removal of spending on things like higher education, etc.). Not that all those policies are bad, just that the burden has been entirely concentrated on the generation that has to pay off the cheque the older generation has written itself.

Combine that with a lack of secure tenure on housing, and we aren't quite getting the rate of birth that could stabilise the dependency ratio problem. At the moment this gap is largely being plugged by immigrants and the children of immigrants, which economically-speaking is fine, but obviously means that Britain is going to look very different in 50 years time.

Agree with all of this, you are able to express concepts clearly. My narrow view, apart from my observations above about taxation, is that technology with respect to quality of life is crucial here. If it continues to drive inequality upward but at the same time makes this irrelevant because quality of live improves dramatically for everyone, then we don't have a huge problem. And hopefully, that is likely to happen.

At the moment I don't think the balance between upward inequality and upward quality of life (in the developed nations) is being met sufficiently to avoid a crux point, but we'll see what happens in the near to medium term.