Spring Budget 2023

Mysterae_ said:
I'm glad you said "a lot of" instead of "all" so-called professional people because then you'd be ignorantly unaware of how many "professionals" make your life easier and safer everyday.

This thread has taken and interesting turn and it reminded me of something somebody once told me - some people are paid for what they do and some people are paid for what they know.
Does society value brain over brawn?
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Not particularly. There doesn't always seem rhyme nor reason to what we value in society.
 
danlightbulb said:
So because it sounds like snobbery we can't have an open conversation about it as a society? Is it snobbish to expect more pay for being a professionally qualified person than as a labourer, or a bin man? What's happening to some extent is the gap between minimum wage jobs and qualified professional jobs is getting smaller. That might be a good thing if you're in a minimum wage job but if you're in a professional job it means you don't have same differential as you used to have.

So we have a shrinking differential for middle earners and the 1% getting ever richer with a growing wealth differential.

What's the point doing a job like the one I do, if I can earn a similar amount as a bus driver?

And I don't mean to disrespect other jobs but there are differentials in job 'levels' and always have been. In fact they are necessary otherwise what is the point doing certain jobs - i.e jobs in engineering continually reported as being difficult to recruit, yet they don't offer the salaries high enough to incentivise those choices.
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Easy answer - you're put out that the pay difference between unskilled and medium skilled jobs (like yours) is not high and, at one point, you mentioned NMW not helping... Perhaps, instead of being annoyed about unskilled pay being higher than you'd like, the medium skilled job employers should pay more?


danlightbulb said:
Yes very high end jobs will maintain a gap. Doctors, pilots - jobs where it is extremely difficult to train for or a high cost of entry. But I think lots of previous 'middle earner' jobs are losing their relative position these days. The lower earner jobs are closing the gap, not least helped by minimum wage.

I don't know what the answer is, it's difficult to have conversations about low earners wages being suppressed when the cost of living is so high, but also qualified professional jobs should have a bigger gap to the lower earner jobs. I see your point that there are other benefits but money has at least an 80% weighting I think. If my teachers had told me I could earn the same as a train driver as a qualified engineer, what would be the point going to university and doing an engineering degree?
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See my point above. But also - "engineer" is an extremely broad term nowadays. What are you and engineer in and what professional qualifications do you have?


danlightbulb said:
I agree with you, they have huge societal value in that their job is essential, but nevertheless it is a low skill job that anyone physically able could do.

How do you square the circle there?

Doctors for example, very high pay only because the cost of entry is high regarding training. It's not a particularly difficult job to do (a gp for example, not a brain surgeon). The maths requirements of an engineering degree are harder than medical qualifications.

How do you know, as a youngster, what job to train for if you can't pinpoint a lifestyle expectation tier from that training outlay? You may as well take the easiest option.
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chrcoluk said:
Dont under estimate the difficulty of those jobs, a tolerance to do a repetitive action for several hours a day, and the physical endurance to sustain such types of work. There was a similar discussion about this a year or so ago, where I made the same point to someone else, in that post I gave an example of in my first job at a food factory, a manager made the engineers do manual work, and one of them practically collapsed within 15 minutes, never mind doing it for a 12 hour shift. They low paid due to the high amount of worker pool available, so yes there is more people capable of doing it, but not everyone could including people in much higher paid skill jobs.

Often a penalty for repititive physical labour is been crippled by the time you middle age.
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Exactly.

The point is - no one these days wants to do the dirty physical jobs anymore. They have been sold a future of office working and 9-5 hours. In order to be able to fill these unskilled roles, employers need to pay more.

Supply and demand....lots of people want a cushy engineering role (see what I did there?) and not be a binman
 
dLockers said:
Probs be a bus driver. Just because you are a bit arrogant about being an 'engineer', whilst being a bus driver is infinitely more useful for civilisation. It's not like you're engineering anything that will significantly change the world now, is it?
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And if every engineer took that approach there would be no buses, or cars, or roads, or phones, or internet ...
 
Mysterae_ said:
Does society value brain over brawn?
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I don't know, society values connections more than anything I.e who you know not what you know. But I know one thing, society would fall apart in days if all these so called low skilled undeserving of minimum wage people stopped working, I think people like danlightbulb should be pursuing higher salaries for themselves rather than bemoaning others being able to scrape a living on the minimum.
 
danlightbulb said:
How do you square the circle there?
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There's only two ways to square the circle so to speak.

1. We tax more, whether that comes in the form of additional rates for the very high paid.

2. We invest more in Automation. In theory anything that is repetitive could be automated relatively easily. This would lead to another societal problem though - what would these workers do for a job when they're replaced by robots etc.
 
Semple said:
There's only two ways to square the circle so to speak.

1. We tax more, whether that comes in the form of additional rates for the very high paid.

2. We invest more in Automation. In theory anything that is repetitive could be automated relatively easily. This would lead to another societal problem though - what would these workers do for a job when they're replaced by robots etc.
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How do you automate caring for the sick and elderly? This issue will get worse as the country ages and the demand increases.
 
200sols said:
I don't know, society values connections more than anything I.e who you know not what you know. But I know one thing, society would fall apart in days if all these so called low skilled undeserving of minimum wage people stopped working, I think people like danlightbulb should be pursuing higher salaries for themselves rather than bemoaning others being able to scrape a living on the minimum.
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But isn't that the circular issue I was talking about?

Minimum wage is there to ensure that a basic level of income is met. Currently that basic level isn't really enough to meet current cost of living as we all know. So if middle earners start being paid more, that will raise the differential again, creating a living standards issue for the poorer people in lower paid jobs.

Fundamentally the issue is that our economy works on there being a differential. We're only better off 'relative' to others, unfortunately. That's what creates the unequal society we live in.

But there has to be a differential otherwise there is no incentive to do better, which is how I think things are going at least in my sector. I could be a train driver for a similar salary as I get now and I wouldn't have to deal with complex project deadlines and mentally draining challenges. Just turn up to shift, drive train, go home.
 
Jobs/society remind me of the human body. It is symbiotic. It requires everyone to do there bit to keep things running along smoothly. There is no job that is indispensable, it is just performed more efficiently and at a higher level by those who dedicate their lives to it, therefore making the lives of others more convient.
I guess if you are happy with society "stagnating" as one may call it, there are plenty of jobs that can be removed *coiugh*engineers and all those who support them*cough*.

Pay for a job is determined by how easy it is to replace you and how much monetary value you bring to a company. The easier you are to replace, the less you are paid. The less money you as an individual generates for the company, the less you are paid. Pre-requiste training a.k.a degrees and certification reduces the pool of people that can replace you which inherently increases your value due to the lower supply. In theory. In this country we do seem to struggle to pay "professionals" (as it has been dubbed in this thread), which will lead to a brain drain.

chrcoluk said:
Covid did show us who are the most valuable workers I think, the people who couldnt stay locked up in their homes, because if they did society would have stopped functioning.
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COVID showed us who can perform their work from home and who couldn't. Nothing to do with value. I don't even think it properly showed people the jobs necessary for just maintaing our quality of life, because a lot of those jobs are invisible. People probably don't even know those jobs exist.
 
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n111ck said:
So France offers an inferior service that is much cheaper to run but still requires state subsidy? sounds French lol
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point remains though that paid childcare is less than a third of the cost of the UK so when it is paid for by the state, it costs the French government even less than ours.
 
ChrisD. said:
Most likely it's due to the hilariously stupendous amount that the state pension is costing the Govt. When it came about people only lived for around 10 years after retirment age. That doesn't hold true anymore. It needs to be aboloshed for new births and every child given £5k to be put in a SIPP to be redeemed at a pensionable age. However no party in power is ever going to do that so it's going to continue to cost a fortune especially as people live longer.
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Worse than that. I think you only need to go back to the 60s or 70s and the average pensioner only lived 3 years. now its more like 15 years. Any ponzi scheme cant withstand that level of increase.
 
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