McDonalds workers due to strike for £10 an hour...

That was for the numbers in your example. I would expect businesses to pay at least 8-8.5 themselves big or small. NLW for over 21 is 7.50 but that seems a bit on teh low side to me and every time we hear about an increase in wage, people shout about a small business apocalypse that never happens.

But yes people would pay a fraction of the wage for some employees in small businesses that fit certain profitability criteria. Though many of the large companies that pay minimum and can afford more with some to spare would fillt he gaps for people who previously would have received benefits.
 
Avenged7Fold said:
But yes people would pay a fraction of the wage for some employees in small businesses that fit certain profitability criteria.
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More expensive bureaucracy to establish what companies in a given year have to pay to their workers (you do understand that a company can make a profit one year then a loss in the next etc?)

Of course the bureaucracy will be two sided with some (small?) companies (as well as the government) having to adjust pay as well as the state! Great news for workers as well as they will inevitably have periods where they are paid too much or too little due to their employer switching between 'bands'
 
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Avenged7Fold said:
That was for the numbers in your example. I would expect businesses to pay at least 8-8.5 themselves big or small. NLW for over 21 is 7.50 but that seems a bit on teh low side to me and every time we hear about an increase in wage, people shout about a small business apocalypse that never happens.

But yes people would pay a fraction of the wage for some employees in small businesses that fit certain profitability criteria. Though many of the large companies that pay minimum and can afford more with some to spare would fillt he gaps for people who previously would have received benefits.
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£8 or £7 it doesn't really matter re: the precise amount it is the principle I'm arguing, point is some companies will have to pay a higher min wage than others who will be topped up by the government. Small companies can afford to pay more too if you want to take a chunk of their profits, you're basically looking at the profit made by large companies and saying well we can simply take a bigger chunk of this and distribute it accordingly thus slashing their dividends (and negatively affecting a load of pensions). Plus introducing some bureaucracy re: assessing individual companies for subsidising their wages.

I don't think the extra bureaucracy is helpful, I don't agree with paying benefits to people not otherwise eligible for them simply because they've chosen to work at a small employer is right.

Benefits are supposed to be assed according to the circumstances/needs to the individual not whether say the McDonalds they work for is owned by the company or by a franchise owner. In creating such a system you're also creating a whole load of incentives with it re: the way people chose to structure companies - you've not given any indication re: where this arbitrary cut off would be or how it would be assessed but the principle of it alone isn't very sound (extra bureaucracy, variable min wage from the perspective of employers, additional in work benefits going to people who don't need nor currently qualify for them).

If you're going to introduce a higher minimum wage then IMO it needs to be universal regardless of the size of the employer.
 
Guys lets remember here that when you look at anything other than a small business 'profit' has absolutely no baring on cash. You can not actually pay people in profit, only cash. Profit does not take into account all capital expenditure which is accounted for via depreciation over the useful life of an asset. Many businesses that are 'profitable' go under because they run out of cash.

Only surplus cash is returned to the owners of the business via a dividend. The rest is used to either invest back into the business on capital assets to ensure the business can continue to operate or is invested back into the business to grow it. The alternative is that it is held for future use but you will find there are not actually that many companies with vast cash reserves and McDonald's certainly isn't one of them.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
Guys lets remember here that when you look at anything other than a small business 'profit' has absolutely no baring on cash. You can not actually pay people in profit, only cash. Profit does not take into account all capital expenditure which is accounted for via depreciation over the useful life of an asset. Many businesses that are 'profitable' go under because they run out of cash.

Only surplus cash is returned to the owners of the business via a dividend. The rest is used to either invest back into the business on capital assets to ensure the business can continue to operate or is invested back into the business to grow it. The alternative is that it is held for future use but you will find there are not actually that many companies with vast cash reserves and McDonald's certainly isn't one of them.
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Is that supposed be a sob story about big business not having enough cash flow because they paid all the cash to shareholders, my heart bleeds for them.
 
Spook187 said:
Is that supposed be a sob story about big business not having enough cash flow because they paid all the cash to shareholders, my heart bleeds for them.
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No its because the media and public in general do not understand the vast differences between turnover, profit and cash. Which has been clearly demonstrated in this thread.

It also points out that companies need to make a certain level of profit to maintain the business as a going concern.

Remember the headlines against Amazon, Starbucks and co "£1 billion turnover but only paid £100k corporation tax". Because turnover has any bearing on what tax an entity pays....

In 2014 McD's UK had a turnover of £1.4 Billion but a profit before tax of £225 Million, not exactly huge margins. Granted that will not take into account the turnover or profit franchisees make but I can not see the margins being higher in a franchise.
 
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It's going to be great in 10-20 years time when all the workers have been replaced by robots and the lorries are all self driven by computers etc. How will any company then be able to make any money, folk won't have any money to spend as there will be even less jobs then there are now.

It's like at work, they ban all over time and everyone is on their minimum contracted hours and they don't replace anyone when they leave. Then the moan when sales are down, don't they realise every company in the land is doing the same thing meaning folk have less cash to spend.
 
Exactly. Putting money in people's hands that have to spend every penny just to get by is better than lining a shareholders account somewhere doing did all. Just numbers on a screen.
 
Efour said:
Exactly. Putting money in people's hands that have to spend every penny just to get by is better than lining a shareholders account somewhere doing did all. Just numbers on a screen.
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except the biggest 'shareholders' are generally pension funds

if people have to spend every penny just to get by then that's their problem, perhaps they ought to take some responsibility for their situation pull their thumb out, improve their skills and find some work that pays a bit more.. leave the min wage stuff to the students/young people and or people who have a working partner or are semi-retired

the idea that employers need pay more than the minimum for work that is literally bottom rung of the ladder stuff is nonsense tbh...
 
I wish I didn't say shares cos it wasn't what I meant as I know that is what most of it is propping up, but that's a whole new farce for another topic.

what I do mean I don't know but I'm hungry so...
 
dowie said:
except the biggest 'shareholders' are generally pension funds

if people have to spend every penny just to get by then that's their problem, perhaps they ought to take some responsibility for their situation pull their thumb out, improve their skills and find some work that pays a bit more.. leave the min wage stuff to the students/young people and or people who have a working partner or are semi-retired

the idea that employers need pay more than the minimum for work that is literally bottom rung of the ladder stuff is nonsense tbh...
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But how do you get a better job when no where is taking on?

Typical Tory clap trap.
 
dowie said:
'no where is taking on' is a false premise to begin with, if you want to take a defeatist attitude then that's up to you
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with the new wave of automation though it is rapidly going to be a very real issue.

us example but its estimated that nearly 50% of jobs could be automated within the next 20 years.

and they arent beiong replaced with anything l;ike the same amoujnt of old jobs.


with previous mechanization sure you needed huge numbers of people to build, transport, assemble and maintain the new machines, but with a software bot?

once you've made it once you can copy and multiply it infinite times for free. there isnt going to be a "software bot asembly line" opening up to provide work for all the truck drivers replaced by automation
 
How did we get to the point where people working in a job that requires literally no qualifications or skill (seriously, the chimps at my nearest branch can't even get your order right half the time) think they deserve more than minimum wage? That kind of job is literally what minimum wage is for.

When I earned minimum wage and didn't like it instead of trying to play 'the world is against me' card I uhh... you know, actually applied myself to getting an education so I could be employable in an above minimum wage job. I didn't just demand more for stacking shelves. It's madness. You don't deserve more, you are contributing literally NOTHING of any real worth to society.
 
dowie said:
'no where is taking on' is a false premise to begin with, if you want to take a defeatist attitude then that's up to you
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No where is taking on as everywhere is streamlining their businesses to save money and cut costs.

Saying get a better job is just the same attitude as me saying there aren't any.
 
LeeUK said:
No where is taking on as everywhere is streamlining their businesses to save money and cut costs.

Saying get a better job is just the same attitude as me saying there aren't any.
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but there are jobs being created, we've got record high unemployment so you're talking nonsense

see:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentan...ployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/june2017

  • There were 31.95 million people in work, 109,000 more than for November 2016 to January 2017 and 372,000 more than for a year earlier.
  • The unemployment rate (the proportion of those in work plus those unemployed, that were unemployed) was 4.6%, down from 5.0% for a year earlier and the joint lowest since 1975.
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so you're making an argument that "no where is taking on" as you phrase it but it is based on nothing other than your own pessimistic world view as employers clearly are taking on workers to the extent that 372,000 more jobs have been created since this time last year!
 
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Tefal said:
with the new wave of automation though it is rapidly going to be a very real issue.

us example but its estimated that nearly 50% of jobs could be automated within the next 20 years.

and they arent beiong replaced with anything l;ike the same amoujnt of old jobs.


with previous mechanization sure you needed huge numbers of people to build, transport, assemble and maintain the new machines, but with a software bot?

once you've made it once you can copy and multiply it infinite times for free. there isnt going to be a "software bot asembly line" opening up to provide work for all the truck drivers replaced by automation
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people have been making that argument for 200 years now, I'll wait for some empirical evidence demonstrating that we're going to see massive job losses before I start to believe that. We've had increased automation for decades - software, machines, machine learning, these are hardly new things - people do hype up AI every so often... it was hyped up in the 70s, and the 80s - there have been "AI Winters" in the past thanks to this sort of hype - the current hype is Deep Learning as a tool to solve everything (while it has been great for image recognition and NLP I'd be cautious about assigning too much hype) back in the 80s it was expert systems.

The creators of back to the future thought we'd have flying cars, nuclear fusion and hover boards by now (aside from a lame attempt at one that hasn't happened).

I'm not sure we need fear our robot overlords just yet:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=669792369880893
 
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