MoneySaving Poll: Would you vote for a Ј14.66 minimum wage?

A question about : MoneySaving Poll: Would you vote for a Ј14.66 minimum wage?

Poll started 20 May 2014

In Switzerland this week, a referendum to introduce a 22 Swiss franc (c.Ј14.66) per hour minimum wage, proposed by trade unions to promote “fair salaries for workers in the lowest-paid professions”, was rejected by the population on grounds that it was state intervention and may hurt the economy. If you were setting the minimum wage in the UK, what would you set it at?

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Best answers:

• As if 20% of people have said they want to see a wage of Ј14 an hour!
  Imagine all the thickos, lazy gits, numpties you have worked with over your career. Now imagine them earning Ј25k a year!!!
  All that you would see is unemployed sky rocket.
  I have recently become an employer and if i had to pay someone Ј14 an hour...I would not be an employer.
  Even as a fully trained and qualified mortgage advisor, I was earning less than that working for a bank 2 years ago.
• You could make min wage 63.10 (10 times current rate) you know all that would happen?
  We would pay ten times more for everything as everyone who has touched a product you are buying is being paid ten times more. You would be no more richer.
  Remember pre euro spain where you paid for things in 1000 and 2000 notes? Thats all that would happen here is inflation would kick in so we would pay for everything with an added 0.
  What is more important is what you earn in comparison to your costs of living.
• For those voting for Ј14+ an hour, I would be interested if you understand the repercussions of such a move, both in terms of the impact on businesses and on consumers. It would be interesting to see justification for such a rise, apart from 'I want more ...'.
• I make no bones about it. I think the minimum wage is not a good thing, I turned 16 just as we started implementing the minimum wage, I as a 16 year old was earning more than the minimum wage for a 21 year old. But that same organisation reduced pay rises over the ensuing 5 or 7 years till miraculously their wages were the same as the minimum wage.
  I hasten to add that this was a shelf stacking job in a major supermarket, basically the minimum wage has meant my ex colleagues have suffered a significant reduction in quality of life, this occurred to many of my friends also working for other large supermarkets. Going from being able to buy a house and car to being on the poverty line within the space of 15 years.
  If you increase the minimum wage all you do is increase the amount it takes to exist in poverty. If there is no minimum wage the market will find levels. There will always be employers who take the Mickey, as we have now with zero hour contracts, or expecting people to clear up at the end of the day on their own time. As individuals we need to stand up for our rights, if you work somewhere that treats you badly do something, strike, change jobs, start up on your own, the opportunities are endless.
  The big problem is the apathy in this country everyone just lets things happen and then complains when it's rubbish.
• Would be for a Citizen's income policy based on a basic living wage paid to all adults, which cannot be taken away when one works, but would be subject to income tax once certain amounts are reached. THEN the minimum wage of around Ј7 or Ј8 per hour.
  This would eliminate benefits frauds and having to claim benefits, and the very expensive and time consuming ways of dealing with it. Poverty would be reduced to a bare minimum, and I feel sure all people would be happier. Yes even the RICH (In the end).
• Other wages would need to rise in direct proportion to the rise in the minimum wage to keep parity for the people with more responsible jobs.
  Managers would also need to have their wages rise otherwise why would they even bother to do their jobs and so on....
  After all the wage increases the money would then need to be found to pay for them and guess where that would come from.
  If there must be a minimum wage then let it stay at the level it is at, if people think they are worth more than that then they should prove it by getting a better paid job.
  I earn just over minimum wage, its a job that suits me, no resposibility other than to see that I do my job properly and hours to suit me rather than a strict 9-5.
• I think minimum wage is fine where it is. Giving businesses an incentive to pay the 'Living Wage' where they can afford it is a better idea than simply forcing all businesses (whether they can afford it or not) to pay more.
  On the Swiss front, bare in mind how high living costs are over there. It's an expensive country. To simply make the conversion in to pounds and say that the Swiss were proposing a Ј14.66/hr minimum wage isn't really telling the full story. From the cost of living index, Switzerland is the second most expensive country in Europe. Factor in the difference in living costs and the proposed minimum wage was more equivalent to Ј10/hr. Still very high, likely why it was voted down.
• the Ј8.80 a hour figure is fine for the most part as I got around that 10 years ago and I know prices have increased but I was able to treat myself then to luxuries though my rent was next to nothing.
  Its more we need to tackle issues like landlords ripping off tenants i.e having high rents for low quality housing and not doing standard repairs as I have lived in or near areas with high unemployment that charge like Ј95 a week rent and LHA is only Ј65 for a under 35 and Ј80 for over Ј35 then as its a poor are no work is available and you are limited in what shops you can use.
  And I can honestly in every job I have had that you get a lot of lazy employees and even lazy supervisors who get paid by performance so harass their workers to work harder just for their own benefit so we are never going to win.
  To give everyone a high minimum wage means the lazy get more for nothing and the hard working are still working above what they should be doing.
• whatever the minimum wage is there would be ways of abusing the system.
  currently i know of two ways the system is fiddled.
  one is foreign workers who earn the bare minimum wage. but work for an agency. the agency then puts additional "costs" for admin and in some cases board and lodgings (cramped bedsits).
  the worker then gets less than minimum wage in the pocket.
  this current practice has in a lot of areas driven down the labour market wage levels to effectively baseline.
  its something which is currently a hot topic with the elections looming on thursday.
  the other is in the service industry where workers wages are technically less than minimum wage, but then get "topped up" by the tips the workers earn to level it at basic minimum wage.
  both practices are rife, totally legal, morally wrong and prime examples of how a minimum wage can still be fiddled.
  it wouldn't matter. all that would happen is the cost of things going up even higher.
• To the employer who says he wouldn't be one if the minimum wage was Ј14 per hour: Good.
• If you want to see the true effect of fixed wages and how they can and will destroy an economy, take a look at the US car industry, the City of Detroit, Michigan, and read the history of how the United Auto Workers held the car manufacturers to ransom forcing extortionate wage rates while the city crumbled, factories closed and jobs were lost.
  There is a feeling that scrapping the minimum wage would lead to greater levels of employee poverty, but I disagree.
  Scrap the minimum wage and allow businesses to hire workers at their own set levels of pay. This will attract more factories and more businesses to the UK which will only drive wages upward until the market will set the levels naturally without government intervention.
• We don't have trades unions that behave like mafioso. We don't have any effective trades union movement at all now. You can't expect withdrawal of a minimum wage to cause a correct level to be reached while we have the total imbalance between the relative powers of corporate interests and labour interests.
  Correct and balanced levels of national living wage arise out of respect for labour, not exploitation of it.
  Accountants tendering for large contracts always look at slashing labour costs before looking at anything else. That means downtreading existing labour and also (usually) removing some of it.
  We are never going to learn how to make good stuff in the UK. We just say we are good at making stuff but we rarely make ground breaking products. We just invent stuff and move on - other cultures turn our ideas into products.
  So huge numbers of UK jobs are just end up as what are euphemistically called "the service sector" and if you downtread labour or remove it from a service, then we all suffer except those who were ruthless enough to do the dirty deed in the name of success or progress. The culprits (yes they are culpable) just siphon off great streams of the cashflows they won with their "labour-saving" tenders and eventually when they get tired of doing it again and again, they disappear with the ill-gotten gains to under their favorite palm-trees.
  Meantime we are all the poorer for it both economically and morally.
  (If you ask me )
• The MW should at least be enough to afford to pay the bills without the need to claim benefits. No more benefits being paid out to full time workers will save the taxpayer a lot more money. So I vote for Ј7.65 outside of London and Ј8.80 within London. Prices will inevitably increase on anything where MW labour is used and the MW will soon need to rise again to cover the increased cost of living. I would like to see the MW at around Ј12.00 within the next 5 years.
• If there has to be minimum wage then it should reflect the cost of living in the majority of that country. Not the same as Switzerland or even Sweden where a young casual worker can get Ј14 an hour but the cost of living is so much higher.
  Because there is a minimum wage, employers don't need to pay more so more are stuck on it.
  Employers of foreign labour are the people who take advantage most. Why do all the local pub and theme park jobs go to foreigners when traditionally they went to the resident young adults?
  Why do we have to have foreigners picking our crops in Lincolnshire when less than half an hour away are Hull and Grimsby with very high unemployment? Why don't the government schemes or the Princes Trust do something to get resident jobless out doing those jobs?
• Whilst I agree we need a (properly enforced) minimum wage, it does not need to be set high. If you are on minimum wage and it more than covered what you needed, what incentive would you have to progress in your career?
• I cannot see why a legal min wage should be less than the living wage, but referring to Switzerland, the q is not so clear.
  We were staying with relatives in Geneva last month and were surprised at the hostility to the idea; young people were worried that their 'first job' opportunities would disappear. I don't understand why: if a job has to be done in Switzerland, then someone has to be employed to do it. If it could be done elsewhere, why would any employer pay Swiss rates, rather than go to China, where other countries' jobs have disappeared to? (Martin will be laughing at my economic ignorance, but perhaps when he stops, he can educate us.)
  Prices there are eye-watering but so are salaries. They have 60,000 non-Swiss, many from over the border a 10 min bus-ride away, so short are they of workers.
  Geneva has Europe's (the world's?) best flea market so, if I give an example of prices there, you'll understand what the situation is in 'proper' shops. They had large quantities of interesting old stuff. My wife was looking through a box of old bits of everyday cutlery and saw a small spoon with an unusually long handle, which she thought would be useful, so she asked how much. "8 francs", over Ј5. She thought she had misheard and asked again. "8 francs", and there was no bargaining. A short time after returning home here, she bought a new one of similar quality for Ј1.
  Switzerland is in the EEA, so I couldn't understand why people didn't go hop in the car and do their shopping in France, where it's cheaper, though not so much as here, but unlike us bringing back as much as we like, apart from alcohol and tobacco, the Swiss have to pay tax on their imports above a small allowance.
• No one on minimum wage - as it currently is - can afford to live on it. Rent is extortinately high, mortgages are unobtainable, food prices have gone up far more than they should have done, we pay tax so our government has the money to pay us "Tax Credits" so we have enough to live on?! Shouldn't the companies making the profits be paying more instead of the government? These same companies that don't pay any tax - due to the tax loop holes in the UK that caMORON promised pre-election to revoke but hasn't done so.
  I am amazed that not more people are voting for higher minimum wage, the top amount is what is needed to live in this awful country where we have children who are starving. Think about it - we are not getting the truth from our media here as they are as corrupt as our rotten government - who awarded themselves a 26% payrise this year and still continue to thieve through their expenses claims which also nothing has been done about this either. Corruption rules.