Is the minimum wage a living wage? If not, why not?

First topic message reminder :

It seems companies don't pay a living wage so the state tops it up with various benefits - this in effect boosts companies profits (government doling out our tax to their profiteer friends?). So just who are the real benefit leeches.....I would suggest the employers using the state to top up the meagre wages they pay - not the employee who has no choice but to claim these benefits in order to survive.

Therefore the benefits system is there to make companies, and the rich, richer!

It's bein' so cheerful as keeps us goin', sickchip.

“Grant me the patience to accept the things I cannot change, the determination to change the ones that I might be able to improve, and the ability to tell the difference.”

anon

Coming to a burger-joint near you??

Fast Food Workers Paid With Fee-Heavy Debit Cards

Fast food workers are being charged fees to access their wages, thanks to growing numbers of American employers — especially retailers and restaurant chains — issuing prepaid debit cards instead of a check or direct deposit. In order to get their money, some workers must go to an ATM to withdraw their cash from the card, which oftentimes requires paying a bunch of different fees. The New York Times reports that restaurant chains like Taco Bell and McDonald's, in addition to large retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, sometimes pay workers with prepaid debit cards.

http://eater.com/archives/2013/07/01/fast-food-food-workers-prepaid-payroll-cards-heavy-fees.php

Source: YouTube
 

Ah yes. The Company Store. Historical predecessor of Pay-Day Loans.

Another day older and deeper in debt!

It's not impossible to suspect that this kind of operation may be designed to show rogue employers that nothing much will happen under a Tory administration if they disregard wage laws.

Writing for ‘The New Statesman’, Katie Schmuecker (a policy and research manager at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) describes how work offers less of a guarantee of a decent living standard than it did in the past. Families where one parent works full time, and the other works part time, and families with a single breadwinner, have seen their risk of falling short of a decent living standard increase sharply.

A new report by Loughborough University tracks how many people are falling short of the Minimum Income Standard. This decline has been brought about by the cost of essentials rising rapidly for several years, when wages have been stagnant and in-work benefits, such as tax credits, cut.

60% of people leaving unemployment in 2014 went into jobs that pay less than the living wage (£7.85 an hour outside London and £9.15 in London). Furthermore, the UK has more low-paid, low skilled-jobs than other western European countries.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/01/jobs-any-price-are-not-enough-close-living-standards-gap

Historically, the kind of thing which can lead to civil commotion unless corrected, but how likely is that from a Tory administration?

An incident this week illustrated for me why perhaps there isn't yet a popular uprising.

Speaking to a young woman about to be sacked from her job locally, I asked had she consulted her trade union rep? Her reply - what's a trade union? - and when I explained how a union can help in these situations she said  'oh, I don't think I'd like that'. It seemed she would prefer to face unemployment rather than have someone knowing her 'private business', even if they were doing so in order to protect her rights.

It seems many nowadays, even people at the bottom of the social heap, see themselves as isolated individuals, completely cut off from any sense of belonging to a social group (except Facebook 'friends'), and consequently with no common ground on which they can stand to challenge injustice or unfairness (as it goes, I felt she had a reasonable case, but as she was not able to access help from the union, and hasn't been in the job long enough to claim unfair dismissal, she will almost inevitably lose her employment)

The united opposition of Employers to any kind of worker consolidation has long been a feature, only challenged seriously after The Tolpuddle Martys were transported to Australia in 1834.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs

John was prepared for the fact that this placement, which was backed by a Labour government programme, would not last forever: it ended in 2011. Nothing, however, could prepare him for what happened next. Last summer, under a new coalition make-work scheme, he was informed that there was, once again, a post for him at LAMH. But the new “offer” came with a twist: this time John would be working without a wage. There would be no reward for 30 hours’ graft, only the threat of subsistence-level benefits being withdrawn if it wasn’t done.

There would be no reward for 30 hours’ graft, only the threat of benefits being withdrawn if it wasn’t done
For John, as for many others, the experience of this recovery has been “yes, you can work, but it might not be work as you used to understand it”. For some, the thing that’s gone is the expectation of a single workplace with a stable body of colleagues. For others, such as the growing army of zero-hours workers, it’s the old idea of a fixed working week that’s gone. And for all except the most fortunate, the old presumption that pay would gradually creep up has been upended: Britain has just been through the most severe wage squeeze since the 1860s.

Extract David Cameron’s cynical attack on ‘skivers’ will hurt the strivers as well
Tom Clark
Guardian