Living Wage

[SpontaneousOrder]

A race to the bottom wouldn't be constructive...

So, we all (hopefully) know how prices work. So what makes you think it would be a race to the bottom?

[Goatfell]

There's a depressing lack of robots making our day to day lives easier.

Remember the automatic car wash places, the ones that were cheap due to their use of the benefits of technology?

Many of them seem to have closed down to be replaced with lots of blokes with buckets and sponges...

[AtW]

I'm probably against a minimum wage, I think the country generally worked quite well before it was introduced.

It worked even better in times of Dickens when kids were doing their bit for society by mining for coal!

[DimPrawn]

It worked even better in times of Dickens when kids were doing their bit for society by mining for coal!

Re-open the pits and send down the unemployed!

[SueEllen]

Re-open the pits and send down the unemployed!

Funny thing is the miners fought running battles with the police to keep their hellhole jobs....

[TykeMerc]

Funny thing is the miners fought running battles with the police to keep their hellhole jobs....

That may have something to do with:-

Mining jobs were well paid.
Mining was a "job for life" they wanted to preserve that.
Allowances for all sorts of stuff were freely available and lucrative.
Paid holidays were good.
The unionisation was very strong (for good historical reasons) and the miners knew that they held a lot of power collectively.
Entire communities revolved around each pit, the miners and their families wanted to protect those.

There were more than a few other reasons.

[unixman]

I've got no problem with living or minimum wage. Increasing it a lot might make immigration worse though, by making low paid jobs more attractive to EU citizens. Or not, if it makes work more attractive to British citizens too.

[SpontaneousOrder]

It worked even better in times of Dickens when kids were doing their bit for society by mining for coal!

Did well for child mortality rates.

[SpontaneousOrder]

I've got no problem with living or minimum wage. Increasing it a lot might make immigration worse though, by making low paid jobs more attractive to EU citizens. Or not, if it makes work more attractive to British citizens too.

Would you have a problem with it if your son or daughter left school and it was illegal for them to get a job, because the marginal productivity they were able to add was less than £9 per hour?

[unixman]

£9 p/h will be the highest minimum wage in Europe, seemingly.