UK Politics - We Don’t Want to See Your Papers, Please

[Liffguard]

36 minutes ago, Gorn said:

A major disadvantage of UBI complementing minimum wage is that, for many people, it wouldn't make financial sense to work at all. By going to work, you are spending money on transit, food/drinks during your break, child care... You also spending significant amounts of your free time on work + commute, and affecting your personal relationships by spending less time with your family/friends.

Many people will look at £8.91 they receive in return for all that, and think "fuck it, might as well stay home and collect the UBI".

This is a feature, not a bug.

[Gorn]

6 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

We’re talking here more of a boost to min wage (albeit incremental), with UBI to top up the difference, not as an alternative to working.

There are certainly a lot of avenue to explore, UBI being used to top up parents having to work part-time, carers etc etc.

Well, that brings me to my major personal gripe with UBI.

Going to work every day and spending a significant percentage of one's life at a workplace is a major sacrifice that people make which should be recognized. Many of these minimum wage jobs are personally demeaning and mind-numbing at best, actively harmful to long-term physical and mental health at worst. People who make that sacrifice should be valued and rewarded for it.

Throwing a chuck of change at everyone for simply existing is not only mildly insulting, it is also demeaning for those who make the above-mentioned sacrifice on a daily basis.

A better solution would be to shorten the work week and increase vacation time while raising wages across the board, especially minimum ones, and to subsidize that wage increase with the money that would otherwise go to UBI, either directly or indirectly through payroll tax cuts.

And yes, care for family members should be recognized as work and rewarded accordingly.

[Spockydog]

7 minutes ago, Gorn said:

And yes, care for family members should be recognized as work and rewarded accordingly.

Indeed. The way this government exploits people who care for family members is scandalous.

[A wilding]

For the record, £15 an hour is approximately the median pay rate for full time employees in the UK. Making that the minimum wage is going to increase the pay for 50% of us (and probably result in some knock on increases for other people as well). I have to agree with those who have been pointing out that this is not something that could possibly be brought in overnight, however much we might think it would be a good idea.

[Spockydog]

21 minutes ago, A wilding said:

For the record, £15 an hour is approximately the median pay rate for full time employees in the UK. Making that the minimum wage is going to increase the pay for 50% of us (and probably result in some knock on increases for other people as well). I have to agree with those who have been pointing out that this is not something that could possibly be brought in overnight, however much we might think it would be a good idea.

This.

One of the more ignorant arguments against raising the minimum wage to something like £15 is, "Well that can't be right. Then that would mean those cleaners/binmen/burger flippers will be earning just as much as me."

Well, duh. 

And, duh again.

Once those cleaners and binmen and burger flippers are earning £15 per hour, you can go to your boss and say, "I like it here, boss, but if you don't pay me more, I'm gonna go down the road and flip burgers for the same wages and quarter the amount of stress."

Anyone who doesn't understand this needs to go and read some books.

[HoodedCrow]

Pickled manufactured meat might be okay!

[Raja]

17 hours ago, mormont said:

There's being realistic and there's selling out vulnerable people. Never mistake the two.

Indeed, especially when we consider the context that these discussions are happening in the UK. To paint a picture of the context that these discussions are happening we can look to The Council of Europe's report regarding 'Combating rising hate against LGBTI people in Europe' released this month, the report goes into details about various countries in Europe, but specifically in the UK, it states the following:

Quote

In the United Kingdom, anti-trans rhetoric, arguing that sex is immutable and gender identities not valid, has also been gaining baseless and concerning credibility, at the expense of both trans people’s civil liberties and women’s and children’s rights. At the IDAHOT Forum 2021, the Minister for Equalities stated, in contradiction with international human rights standards with respect to the rights of trans people, “We do not believe in self-identification”.

Such rhetoric – which denies trans identities – is being used to roll back the rights of trans and non-binary people and is contributing to growing human rights problems. UK hate crime statistics show a sharp increase in transphobic crimes since 2015 – though only 1 in 7 victims report them to an authority. Online abuse is also rising, and many trans people fear for their safety.

There is intense and ongoing social, political and legal debate about what constitutes harmful discourse when it comes to trans people and their rights, and arguments defending freedom of expression have been – and are still being – used as a tool to justify transphobic rhetoric, further penalizing and harming already marginalized trans people and communities.

It is also becoming increasingly difficult for individuals and organizations to publicly affirm young trans people without being subject to hostility and disproportionate questioning from wider society. The ‘gender-critical’ movement, which wrongly portrays trans rights as posing a particular threat to cisgender women and girls, has played a significant role in this process, notably since the 2018 public consultation on updating the Gender Recognition Act 2004 for England and Wales.

In parallel, trans rights organizations have faced vitriolic media campaigns, in which trans women especially are vilified and misrepresented. The gender-critical campaign – which continues to gain momentum, power and financial support – has been instrumental in creating a situation in which legal gender recognition processes still require a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and remain inaccessible to non-binary people and anyone under 18.

There is also a concerning, growing account of parents who (due to difficulties in accessing timely public health care) pursue private health care on behalf of their child, being investigated by State authorities. Trans healthcare is also being erroneously portrayed as a form of LGB conversion therapy

 

[Poobah]

1 hour ago, Gorn said:

Well, that brings me to my major personal gripe with UBI.

Going to work every day and spending a significant percentage of one's life at a workplace is a major sacrifice that people make which should be recognized. Many of these minimum wage jobs are personally demeaning and mind-numbing at best, actively harmful to long-term physical and mental health at worst. People who make that sacrifice should be valued and rewarded for it.

Throwing a chuck of change at everyone for simply existing is not only mildly insulting, it is also demeaning for those who make the above-mentioned sacrifice on a daily basis.

A better solution would be to shorten the work week and increase vacation time while raising wages across the board, especially minimum ones, and to subsidize that wage increase with the money that would otherwise go to UBI, either directly or indirectly through payroll tax cuts.

And yes, care for family members should be recognized as work and rewarded accordingly.

Why couldn't, or wouldn't, having UBI be a part of raising wages and reducing the work week? If, as you suggest, huge swathes of people would quit their jobs overnight with the introduction of UBI would that not drive employers to offer higher wages and better hours in order to retain or reacquire employees so they can continue to exist?

[polishgenius]

Fucking hell

[Spockydog]

That is straight up Big Brother and absolutely terrifying. 

Also, legalise drugs, ffs. 

Starmer is out of control. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

8 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Fucking hell

To misquote Orwell.

Big Fat Copper is watching you (every step you take, every move you make, every breath you take - yeah, the irony of that being a Police song only just dawned on me).

[Hereward]

1 hour ago, Spockydog said:

This.

One of the more ignorant arguments against raising the minimum wage to something like £15 is, "Well that can't be right. Then that would mean those cleaners/binmen/burger flippers will be earning just as much as me."

Well, duh. 

And, duh again.

Once those cleaners and binmen and burger flippers are earning £15 per hour, you can go to your boss and say, "I like it here, boss, but if you don't pay me more, I'm gonna go down the road and flip burgers for the same wages and quarter the amount of stress."

Anyone who doesn't understand this needs to go and read some books.

Very true. Anyone who doesn’t understand that the efforts to maintain pay differentials absent increased productivity to pay for it needs to read some books about the industrial unrest of the 60s and 70s and where that ended up.

[BigFatCoward]

9 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

To misquote Orwell.

Big Fat Copper is watching you (every step you take, every move you make, every breath you take - yeah, the irony of that being a Police song only just dawned on me).

If technology and grasses can do my job for me so I can sit on my arse all day I'm all for it. 

[A wilding]

15 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Fucking hell

Hasn't the stupid idiot heard of Nextdoor? Or is the undoubted fact that this will be used to harass minorities, ex girlfriends etc a feature rather than a bug as far as she is concerned?

[A Horse Named Stranger]

1 minute ago, BigFatCoward said:

If technology and grasses can do my job for me so I can sit on my arse all day I'm all for it. 

You say it now, but imagine you being stuck behind a monitor watching Boris Johnson 24/7. Oh, it's noon, he woke up, went out to collect the newspaper - he is conservative, so he still gets a printed copy. And oh no, there the belt of his bathrobe came off, and no he doesn't believe in underwear either. You can see everything.

[dog-days]

7 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Well that depends. Depends on whether you believe that working one full time job in this country should be enough to put a roof over your head and food in your belly.

It depends on whether you believe that the people who have kept the world running for the past two years are actually 'essential' workers whose pay should go some way towards reflecting that.

It depends on whether you believe that businesses who cannot afford to pay their staff a proper wage shouldn't be in business at all.

And it also depends on whether you believe that raising the minimum wage will ultimately raise wages for everyone.

Hint: It will.

I work full-time and earn quite a lot less per year than what a person on a minimum wage of £15/hour would earn. I do still manage to eat well and pay the rent on my one-bed mini-house, though the latter would be difficult in most major cities, and wouldn't be possible if I lived in London, say. I'm not against raising the minimum wage. 

But a big raise like this would end up being passed on by employers to goods and services. The cost of living would rise. Ultimately, I'm not sure how much it would benefit the people it's meant to help. It seems more like one of the Labour policies from the 2019 campaign, where they were just throwing things at a wall at random to see what stuck. 

Moves like building more affordable housing, giving more funding to health and social care, and providing free childcare so that parents can go back to work seem more likely to me to help low-income workers, along with reducing NI payments and income tax. 

[Spockydog]

38 minutes ago, Hereward said:

Very true. Anyone who doesn’t understand that the efforts to maintain pay differentials absent increased productivity to pay for it needs to read some books about the industrial unrest of the 60s and 70s and where that ended up.

Yeah. And wasn't a lot of that unrest basically caused by corporations and governments trying to fuck people over?

Speaking of pay differentials, today, it is estimated that the gender pay differential remains somewhere around the 15-20% range.

In 2021, that is outrageous. 

So, applying your logic, should we also allow this to remain unaddressed? I mean, where is that 15-20% supposed to come from without any increase in productivity? 

[Hereward]

11 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Yeah. And wasn't a lot of that unrest basically caused by corporations and governments trying to fuck people over?

Speaking of pay differentials, today, it is estimated that the gender pay differential remains somewhere around the 15-20% range.

In 2021, that is outrageous. 

So, applying your logic, should we also allow this to remain unaddressed? I mean, where is that 15-20% supposed to come from without any increase in productivity? 

No, that’s not my logic at all, I cannot imagine why you would think so. Women are already as productive as men so there is no reason whatsoever they should be paid less for doing the same work.

On your other point, I am trying to point out that we have been here before when trying to achieve a high wage economy like Germany’s. Unfortunately the answer isn’t as simple and obvious as you, or previous proponents on both left and right have suggested.

The left has often said, pay people as much as the Germans, but in isolation all this leads to is businesses going bust, because they are still investment poor, inefficient, badly managed, and with undertrained and unproductive staff.

The right’s version was to let such businesses, whether state funded or private, go the wall, to be replaced by companies that did not have these faults. Which worked, in a way, it just turned out these businesses weren’t in Britain.

TLDR, you cannot just raise everyone’s wages and expect that solves the problem, it’s far more difficult and complicated than that.

[Spockydog]

22 minutes ago, Hereward said:

No, that’s not my logic at all, I cannot imagine why you would think so. Women are already as productive as men so there is no reason whatsoever they should be paid less for doing the same work.

So why are they? 

In the UK, the gender pay differential is estimated to be 15-20%. 

I'm not making this up. You can check with the CBI if you don't believe me. They've currently got it pegged at 18%. That means that men are being paid 18% more than women for doing exactly the same job. The same level of productivity. 

I'm not sure why I need to explain this to you. Or do you seriously believe that there is no gender pay gap in this country? 

So, my question remains. How do you propose to close the gender pay gap, absent any increase in productivity? 

Or do you think we should just ignore it?

[Hereward]

4 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

So why are they? 

In the UK, the gender pay differential is estimated to be 15-20%. 

I'm not making this up. You can check with the CBI if you don't believe me. They've currently got it pegged at 18%. That means that men are being paid 18% more than women for doing exactly the same job. The same level of productivity. 

I'm not sure why I need to explain this to you. Or do you seriously believe that there is no gender pay gap in this country? 

So, my question remains. How do you propose to close the gender pay gap, absent any increase in productivity? 

Or do you think we should just ignore it? 

 

What? This is not what we were talking about at all. You raised it, I said this was a separate issue, and an unacceptable one. How you think you need to explain this to me, or where you get the idea I’m in favour is beyond me. 
 

I’ll try again. Gender pay gaps are UNACCEPTABLE AND ILLEGAL and should be dealt with with the full force of the law.