Smell The Coffee

[tonyav]

Have the labour party woken up and are smelling the coffee.
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/harman-labour-will-not-vote-against-welfare-bill-and-limiting-child-tax-credits/ar-AAcSskO

[ichkeria]

"Why should a 24 year old get paid less than a 25 years old, whilst doing the same job ? The Minimum Wage was supposed to do away with discrepancies like that. "

There is a staggering bias, intentional or otherwise, being shown by the current government, against young people (as well as against the BBC) at the moment
Some say it's because the Tories don't care about people who don't vote for them, or who don't vote at all. In which case I'd suggest perhaps it is time the party in blue started sniffing out for that caffeine aroma, because it's a bit risky to assume that all those oppressed people are going to switch to the Tories - or start voting for them - when they are older.

[mikey4444]

But the Government is not paying everybody more wages, only those 25 and over. Those younger than this are being left on the meagre Minimum Wage, as I and others have repeatedly explained to you. The Government that you support and voted for, have decided to pay younger people different amounts of money, for doing the same job.

Defend this if you can.

[naomi24]

Mikey, I don’t need to defend it - and you don't need to 'explain' it so please don't patronise me. Young people have always been paid less for doing the same job, and yes, changes are being made, but I would guess the new regulations are intended to encourage young people to take personal responsibility rather than beginning their adult lives expecting to be 'entitled' - and that's not a bad thing. The Labour government introduced tuition fees (something I never supported), with, I presume, a similar intention, and they planned to raise the age at which people could draw their State pension, thereby cutting the cost of the welfare bill at the other end of the spectrum. Like it or not, the simple fact is we have a system that is financially unsupportable and it would appear that, unlike you, both main political parties are sensible enough to acknowledge that something must be done to remedy it. If you wish to support people who are quite capable of supporting themselves do it - but don't expect the rest of us to join you.

[mikey4444]

So, you support a divisive and unfair policy then Naomi...just checking !

[naomi24]

Mikey, I would dearly love everyone to earn fantastic wages - but, unlike you, I live in the real world.

[mikey4444]

Naomi....I hope you never need someone like my niece to care for you when you are older, but if you are unfortunate to have to do so, I am sure that it will be a great relief to you to know that some wealthy people are being given a tax break, instead of this carer being paid a reasonable wage.

Lets hope your carer will be 25 and older, as I am sure she will do a much better job than a 24 year old !

Reasonable you note, not fantastic....nobody but you have used the word fantastic !

[naomi24]

Mikey, you assume too much - but spare me the bleeding hearts.

[mikey4444]

Naomi...you have confirmed that you agree with Osborne's divisive new "Living Wage" so I will leave it at that. You voted for him....I didn't.

[naomi24]

Yes, I did vote for him. I'm not daft enough to do otherwise.

[chrissa1]

Just to join in the, Mikey/Naomi debate..... When I qualified as a Teacher in the 70's, I was paid substantially less than the older members of staff in the same school. I accepted this and also that my wage would rise as my experience and time in the job, increased. It was ever, thus.

[ichkeria]

But that is not comparable to the principle that, if you are going to have a minimum wage, it should apply below the age of 25 -- which in all honesty is not that young

[jourdain2]

I'll echo Chrissa - and am dismayed by this 'fast-tracking of young teachers - you need very experienced teachers for difficult and deprived children if you are to get the best out of them. Experience comes with (guess what?).... experience!

[Hypognosis]

@naomi

//
//He gave the working poor a small handout, and then took it back again, in spades.//

In that case the working poor are no worse off.
//

small
in spades

Two completely different sizes. The nub of the debate is that the poorest ate worse off. More has been gouged back than was handed out. Osborne will, however, use the raised tax threshold repeatedly, as a rhetorical device until it becomes a mantra, rather like "treasury note: there is no more money" or "Labour caused the downturn" (as opposed to US sub-prime and fractional reserve banking).


//The idea is to relieve the tax payer of the burden //

Burden.

Burden, burden, burden.

People who provide valuable services to the community: carers, cleaners. We should value what they do for us and remunerate them accordingly but, if it's granny's care bill, we want it to be £1000 a week, not £2000. We want the cleaning contract to be the lowest bidder. The work is unpleasant, no-one with qualifications and choice would touch it with a bargepole. So the jobs go to those desperate for ANY job they can find.

As far as society is concerned, they are a burden.

We are all lucky that they are not unionised, not organised and in no position to fight back… all in the same week.

[naomi24]

Hypognosis, The workers aren’t the burden – the bill paid by the taxpayer to top up their earnings is – and that is what the government is attempting to address. The argument from the left that appears to say they would rather the taxpayer bridge the gap than employers be obliged to pay higher wages is a strange one.

[Hypognosis]

Yes it is strange. Blair's sop to the employer classes.

If the employer paid those higher wages though, the dent would be entirely in *their* pocket, so they would still be whining about the cost of these employees.

Corporations getting the general taxpayers to subsidise their lowest paid workers was a great wheeze, don't you think? That is why it has to be stopped, imho.

As the saying has it, they want to privatise all profits but socialise their losses.

[naomi24]

Hypognosis, //Corporations getting the general taxpayers to subsidise their lowest paid workers was a great wheeze, don't you think? That is why it has to be stopped, imho.//

I agree, but that’s not the only reason it has to be stopped. It’s crazy to give benefits to people on condition that they work for a maximum of 16 hours a week. The system is simply wrong – and the unscrupulous, both employers and employees, have taken full advantage of it.

[Gromit]

Companies such as the Supermarket chains are paying minimum wages and zero hours contracts and are making eye watering profits. And yet the tax payer is having to subsidise them by topping up their employees wages to the tune of £11 BILLION a year

[Hypognosis]

//
Gromit
And yet the tax payer is having to subsidise them by topping up their employees wages to the tune of £11 BILLION a year
//

Which raises my curiosity no end.

1. Do they not know this is going on?
2. Do they refuse to acknowledge this is going on?
3. Do they care one jot that this is going on?
4. Would they go so far as to complain to their MP or the party apparatus, in writing, that this is going on?

However, with regard to 3, they* have every reason to want to maintain this status quo. Subsidised wages support lower prices and turns what might be an organisation which is totally uncompetitive in the wider marketplace into a market-leading behemoth.

The payoff, for the individual customer is those cheaper prices (tacitly ignoring the fact that their own taxes are supportig the 'cheapnis', in the process).
It is akin to the mistaken belief that non-BBC channels cost them nothing, yet every time they buy a product, because the advert influenced them, they have effectively paid a few pennies for the privilege of watching that advert. Indeed, however many millions it takes to run each of ITV, C4, 5, Sky and the rest of them, it is all paid for by Joe Public, hidden in the cost of what we buy.

* I need to qualify "they". I would like to confine it to those kinds of people who, loudly, resent (a) the fact that taxes are taken off them at all (libertarians); (b) the amount of taxes taken off them (because they are comfortably off enough for this to be a deep gouge, out of their slice of the pie); (c) the fact that it is spent on people lower down the social scale than themselves.

The Murdoch agenda keeps ramming home (c), so as to stoke up class hatred and the Tories mostly concentrate on (b).

It just goes to show, though: employers have got political parties on both sides under the thumb. Bring in a living wage at the 'grunt' end of the labour force, where the salaries are small but the numbers of staff are high and they can threaten to have massive layoffs in every vulnerable constituency.

Now that's what I call politics!