MoneySaving Poll: Would you vote for a £14.66 minimum wage?

To the employer who says he wouldn't be one if the minimum wage was £14 per hour: Good.

We don't have trades unions that behave like mafioso. We don't have any effective trades union movement at all now. You can't expect withdrawal of a minimum wage to cause a correct level to be reached while we have the total imbalance between the relative powers of corporate interests and labour interests.

Correct and balanced levels of national living wage arise out of respect for labour, not exploitation of it.

Accountants tendering for large contracts always look at slashing labour costs before looking at anything else. That means downtreading existing labour and also (usually) removing some of it.

We are never going to learn how to make good stuff in the UK. We just say we are good at making stuff but we rarely make ground breaking products. We just invent stuff and move on - other cultures turn our ideas into products.

So huge numbers of UK jobs are just end up as what are euphemistically called "the service sector" and if you downtread labour or remove it from a service, then we all suffer except those who were ruthless enough to do the dirty deed in the name of success or progress. The culprits (yes they are culpable) just siphon off great streams of the cashflows they won with their "labour-saving" tenders and eventually when they get tired of doing it again and again, they disappear with the ill-gotten gains to under their favorite palm-trees.

Meantime we are all the poorer for it both economically and morally.

(If you ask me )

If there has to be minimum wage then it should reflect the cost of living in the majority of that country. Not the same as Switzerland or even Sweden where a young casual worker can get £14 an hour but the cost of living is so much higher.
Because there is a minimum wage, employers don't need to pay more so more are stuck on it.
Employers of foreign labour are the people who take advantage most. Why do all the local pub and theme park jobs go to foreigners when traditionally they went to the resident young adults?
Why do we have to have foreigners picking our crops in Lincolnshire when less than half an hour away are Hull and Grimsby with very high unemployment? Why don't the government schemes or the Princes Trust do something to get resident jobless out doing those jobs?

Enterprise_1701C wrote: »

Whilst I agree we need a (properly enforced) minimum wage, it does not need to be set high. If you are on minimum wage and it more than covered what you needed, what incentive would you have to progress in your career?

That's an interesting take on it, Enterprise - strive to be the best that you can be and get rewarded ? But this is where it all goes wrong. Your measure "progress in your career" - that creates a circular or spiral argument for most people - "I need more money therefore I need to get more money therefore I need to get promoted and now I am promoted I have to tell myself why I am in this lofty stressful position where I need even more money to fool myself into thinking that I have got all the things and friends I need and I look like I am happy and my Facebook and Linked-in page looks interesting"

No, that won't do. We are a highly developed society. Money enough not to worry about basic living costs is the platform we should all be given to start from now. We certainly don't need the stick of fear of poverty to make us work for the carrot of more money. We need to feel we are getting employer and societal respect for whatever we choose to do or stay doing in our jobs. Then we develop the confidence that gives us in knowing that actually we are living just as useful lives as the City high fliers, and we are empowered to be the best that we can be measured in oh so many different ways which are nothing to do with our "career". I have had several careers, high paid, low paid - mentally demanding, physically demanding, satisfying, boring, respected and disrespected. None of them are the key to my own happiness and usefulness to society. Sure, that's easily said when you are middle-aged and find yourself with the time to say it, but let s not congratulate ourselves too much on how we got there when young people are struggling so much to make plans for a future. Most of us were given a leg up by the societies created by previous generations. Those of us who might be economic migrants or whose parents or ancestors were might like to tell a story of "striving" and "achieving" too. But they all got their leg up in a way too. They exploited an opportunity to get a leg up, same as many from poorer parts of EU right now. We don't blame any of them for it. Let's just not get tangled up in thinking that exploiting opportunity for a leg up is the name of the game for all of us. That doesn't create a nice culture.

We need to live and young people especially do. Those that fool themselves that their measure of success is how much money they bring home need to be actively shown that they need to pay more tax and they also need to be made to pay a lot more for the anonymous labour they burn up unthinkingly as they scramble to the top of their career heaps. I am talking about a significant adjustment to the distribution of wealth in our country to make the extremes less likely. And remember that wealth isn't just pounds or dollars or euros or Swiss Francs, but an adjustment to who gets those at the bottom and who gets to keep less at the top would be a good start!

No one on minimum wage - as it currently is - can afford to live on it. Rent is extortinately high, mortgages are unobtainable, food prices have gone up far more than they should have done, we pay tax so our government has the money to pay us "Tax Credits" so we have enough to live on?! Shouldn't the companies making the profits be paying more instead of the government? These same companies that don't pay any tax - due to the tax loop holes in the UK that caMORON promised pre-election to revoke but hasn't done so.

I am amazed that not more people are voting for higher minimum wage, the top amount is what is needed to live in this awful country where we have children who are starving. Think about it - we are not getting the truth from our media here as they are as corrupt as our rotten government - who awarded themselves a 26% payrise this year and still continue to thieve through their expenses claims which also nothing has been done about this either. Corruption rules.