Minimum wage rise - good or bad?

[Guinness]

So there is talk of the minimum wage rising from the current £6.31 to £7 an hour by October 2015.

In principle this is great news, but at what cost? I don't think this will hit big business, it will hit small to medium business HARD, and it will have a knock on effect on unemployment.

Lets give an extreme example, a supermarket buys milk as cheaply as it can, the dairy farmer has to pay his labourers to get this milk, he can afford £6.50 an hour and make a small profit for himself, suddenly he's told he has to pay £7 by law and he begins to make a small loss...he asks the supermarket for more, they say no, we need to keep our prices down..farmer goes out of business, labourers become unemployed, milk becomes scarce and the price for consumers goes up.

Alternatively the farmer fires his English labourers and pays an EU agency, they ship in EU labourers and pay them £10-£40 a day, he keeps his small profit and stays in business, the agency creams the rest and British labourers become unemployed.

Only losers are British low paid.

Surely if the government truly cared for the low paid they would lower their tax rate or increase the threshold before you have to pay tax.

As a rough guide £7-20% = £5.60...£6.31-10% = £5.68

You know, the use of EU agencies is becoming more and more appealing to small businesses particularly those in the service industry, (restaurants, hotels, care, transport etc..), especially when you factor in the cost of the upcoming automatic pension enrolment in 2014/15.

Rambling a bit now but these service industries dominate our economy...we mess with them at our peril!

[cashman]

Originally Posted by Guinness

So there is talk of the minimum wage rising from the current £6.31 to £7 an hour by October 2015.

In principle this is great news, but at what cost? I don't think this will hit big business, it will hit small to medium business HARD, and it will have a knock on effect on unemployment.

Lets give an extreme example, a supermarket buys milk as cheaply as it can, the dairy farmer has to pay his labourers to get this milk, he can afford £6.50 an hour and make a small profit for himself, suddenly he's told he has to pay £7 by law and he begins to make a small loss...he asks the supermarket for more, they say no, we need to keep our prices down..farmer goes out of business, labourers become unemployed, milk becomes scarce and the price for consumers goes up.

Alternatively the farmer fires his English labourers and pays an EU agency, they ship in EU labourers and pay them £10-£40 a day, he keeps his small profit and stays in business, the agency creams the rest and British labourers become unemployed.

Only losers are British low paid.

Surely if the government truly cared for the low paid they would lower their tax rate or increase the threshold before you have to pay tax.

The last paragraph nails it,simple as. None of the parties give a stuff about the low paid, it aint sensible to do so,when yer owners/directors etc of some of these places, A case of i'm alright jack,stuff the low paid.

[Margaret Pilkington]

I think the idea of lowering the tax threshold for low earners is the best one.
It gives the lower paid more money but not at the expense of the employer.

Ok, so the money is being taken out of the tax coffers, but if you earn more money then you spend more money on things that would put this money back. You are also likely to be helping the local exonomy.......fostering a work ethic is important too.
Work is not just something you do to earn your daily bread, you have social interaction with work colleagues...you gain more than money by working. You gain self esteem.

Benefits trap people. They stop them from achieving, they stop them believing that anything can be different.
After a long time out of the work place you doubt your ability to be able to do a job.

[Margaret Pilkington]

Having just voted and looking at the results of this poll, it seems like I am not the only one who thinks this way.

[cmonstanley]

i cant believe they have fiddled the rate of inflation to 2% ,but then i cant believe they have tried to cover up the long term youth unemployment figures either. in one breathe they are saying house prices are rising fast but inflation is 2%. i wonder what the time scale is for this rise in the nmw or how much will it rise for under 24s .

[Margaret Pilkington]

And no other government ever did this?
Fiddled the figures.
I have a cynical disregard for figures and statistics provided by ANY government.
They are there purely to bamboozle.

Anyway, that wasn't the question that was posed in this poll.

[Margaret Pilkington]

Originally Posted by cmonstanley

i wonder what the time scale is for this rise in the nmw or how much will it rise for under 24s .

Perhaps at the next cabinet meeting you slide under the door to attend, you will be able to pose that question and tell us all.
I wait with baited breath.

[accyman]

any government gives with one hand and takes with the other the only concern this lot have about how they do this is that it makes the poorer folk feel like they are getting something so they gettheir votes.

whichever way this is done the poor will continue to be screwed and wont be any better off

[accybeme]

lowering the tax threshold & ring fencing would certainly assist the low paid worker but the missing revenue would have to resourced from the middle class or the rich and I think there is only one political party that would be in favour of implementing this option

[Margaret Pilkington]

Accyman, I don't think this is necessarily true.

To give those lowest paid a hand by not taking money in taxes has got to give them a bit of a boost(then, how they spend it is their business - fags and booze will give it back to the chancellor).....perhaps another way would be to allow smaller businesses to benefit from paying less tax to employ people would help too.

[Margaret Pilkington]

The missing revenue would be recouped in other ways. A really good way would be to close the tax loopholes that big businesses exploit.....Ok, it isn't illegal for them to make use of these loopholes, but it is immoral and the government knows about them so they should be closed.
If the company says it will relocate to somewhere else, then let them...it leaves a space in the market where some other company who is prepared to pay their way can get a footing.
Each business that screws HMRC is screwing the customer.

If someone is getting more money by working rather than by being paid benefits this has to be better for the worker and better for the country.

[accyman]

Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington

Accyman, I don't think this is necessarily true.

To give those lowest paid a hand by not taking money in taxes has got to give them a bit of a boost(then, how they spend it is their business - fags and booze will give it back to the chancellor).....perhaps another way would be to allow smaller businesses to benefit from paying less tax to employ people would help too.

if they made a poor family better off by £10 per week at the next budget they would be screwed out of £15 per week

like i said whatever they loose will be clawed back by eithe rincresing a tax or creating a new tax

closing tax loopholes would gain some of the loss but this is a government that takes people who owe millions in tax to lunch at our expense and beggs them to pay at least some of the money they owe instead of sending in the bailiffs

[Margaret Pilkington]

So then what is your solution?
There will always be poor people...and by that I mean that some people will remain poor whatever is done.
I have been poor and what this meant was that there was no money(not a red cent in my mothers purse) and no food. What is more there was absolutely no welfare to help us out of the hole. We didn't rob from others who were just like us. My mother pawned her wedding ring to put food on the table.

What this taught me was you have to rely on yourself. You have to do what you can to make your own life better.
There are always going to be those who are rich......that is how life is.....unless you live in China or some other communist country(and there is bribery and corruption in those societies too).......so come up with some better system.

Stop sending aid money overseas to countries that have despotic rulers, to countries that have space programs, to countries that have the lions share of all commercial markets(China)...spend the money on projects in this country that will give real work to jobless youngsters.
Stop paying those who are able bodied to stay at home and live off the tax payer.

[cmonstanley]

we could all vote ukip UKIP pledges to send homosexual couples to drought affected areas

[Less]

Originally Posted by cmonstanley

we could all vote ukip UKIP pledges to send homosexual couples to drought affected areas

What has that got to do with minimum wage?
You Muppet.