Boris's intensive care nurse

[Richdog]

I live in Switzerland and my only comment is please don't come here. Too many auslanders as it is.

Hah.

 

[chrcoluk]

No i should have been more specific and said a nurse on minimum wage would earn £20K per annum so they deserve a lot more than that.

Unskilled labourers working for my company in the North east get paid £29k now. Why anybody would want to become a nurse in this country is behind me and they have my respect and admiration.

Honestly, unless you are working really low hours per week, £25k is nothing nowadays. I mean working 40 hours per week stacking shelves at any supermarket gets you £20k per annum. Our office staff doing basic admin are all on £25k.

Your company seems pretty generous, average unskilled wage in my city is "meets minimum wage" and on top of that usually zero hour contracts. I dont think for one moment that 29k for unskilled work is common place. Also been a labourer is not necessarily easy, a lot of people assume unskilled work is easy.

Tesco in Leicester pays £18720 year approx.

The issue is that I think Nurses salaries haven't kept pace with minimum wage increases, at one point the gap in terms of % was much bigger. In 2015 it was £6.70 an hour and now its just under £9 an hour. That's a pretty significant bump to min/living wage.
Meanwhile Nurse average salary was around £31600 in 2016. (was hard to find this info as graph I found was auto adjusted for inflation). If we add the same % it should be nearer to about £41080, a lot closer to Germany.

The issue here is people keep voting for a government who doesnt want to spend on public services, and then are surprised public sector pay lags behind.

Moving forward, public sector pay should perhaps be legally required to either match % increase in living wage, or at least match RPI, the tories put it in law that a government cant increase benefits above a certain amount. meaning a tory government can put in law they cant increase public sector pay below RPI. At the very least this should be done for what are considered key roles, such as Police, Nurses, Teachers. It isnt cut and dry as living wage was designed as a "catch up" by design it was to reduce the gap to the average salary. So those with salaries above living wage, and seeing the gap closing will feel that they are not getting the pay increases they should be getting, but for sure the nurse salaries in my opinion have gone up a pitiful amount in last 5 years.

To summarise 33k is not close to min wage which is high 18000s, but the increases are clearly below inflation (seems to be roughly 1% per year by my maths). If comparing to other western countries and inflation the pay needs a bump, however once this bump is done the % increase probably shouldnt match living wage bumps as those are designed to get the low earners to catchup with the rest, but rather match RPI instead.