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Question Time

misterdog said:
No people with common sense who realise that if the 16 year old school leaver washing glasses in a bar is paid 'minimum' £ 10 per hour £ 400/week.

Then your basic grade teacher and nurse will demand £ 600/800 per week and these jobs are funded by ????

The guy running the bar and in charge of the 16 year old will want 600/800 per week so your pint of beer will cost you £ 7/8.

So only tax increases for the wealthy.....

Jeremy needs to get some posters printed and stick them on a bus with these genius ideas.
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Funny, in 1989 as student I started doing bar work. £4 an hour was the going rate. A couple of inflation calculators suggest that that converts to between £9.79 and £10 now. Why was it affordable then and not now?
 
lordsummit said:
Funny, in 1989 as student I started doing bar work. £4 an hour was the going rate. A couple of inflation calculators suggest that that converts to between £9.79 and £10 now. Why was it affordable then and not now?
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Because nobody gets to work in a bar for 40 hours a week. You would get pulled in when the bar got busy, say 8 o'clock so you would only get 2-3 hours a night and then maybe only Thursday Friday Saturday .......9 hours a week.( often cash in hand )
 
Joe said:
Because nobody gets to work in a bar for 40 hours a week. You would get pulled in when the bar got busy, say 8 o'clock so you would only get 2-3 hours a night and then maybe only Thursday Friday Saturday .......9 hours a week.( often cash in hand )
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Ah that must explain why zero hours contracts are so well paid....
 
Joe said:
Because nobody gets to work in a bar for 40 hours a week. You would get pulled in when the bar got busy, say 8 o'clock so you would only get 2-3 hours a night and then maybe only Thursday Friday Saturday .......9 hours a week.( often cash in hand )
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You seem to be cataclysmically missing the point.
Poster says £10 per hour is unsustainable in bar work, I point out that thirty years ago a relative rate of pay was apparently sustainable. No-one mentioned the number of hours.
By the way even in those days I was PAYE, and had to fill in the requisite student forms. Cash in hand wasn’t a factor. I worked at Whitbreads for a good chunk of the early nineties. In the holidays got lots of hours and made a half decent living. Could have joined their management scheme.
 
lordsummit said:
You seem to be cataclysmically missing the point.
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I didn't think that I did..maybe I didn't make my point clear. The vast majority of bar work is/was part time. The vast majority of bar workers are not costing bars £400 a week as the OP maintained hence his point about that those wage levels escalating other wage levels was, I felt , moot.

Could be wrong...often am.

( all this accepts that there is some full time bar work and some of it is career structured but I felt that we were talking about casual bar work )
 
Cash in hand is to all intents and purposes gone. The employer now also has to pay pension contributions even on part time staff, and the rents and general overheads of running a pub are far higher than they used to be. The resulting cost of a pint of beer together with all the other social factors, and with cheap booze in the supermarkets, has made it very difficult to make money in the pub game nowadays.

When I was a boy a single pub in Worthing paid overheads and made sufficient profit to send my brother and myself to private schools. It isn't even a pub now, long closed.
 
All part of the rip off Britain concept.

We imagine one person doing productive work towing a trailer load of hangers on.

Any small business is expensive to run now.
 
Tied pubs...rents screwed to the sticking point and beer only to be bought from the owners, at rates higher than retail.
Wonder who's ending up with the money...not the bar staff, that's for sure.
 
Good Morning All,

I remember watching what I thought was quite an illuminating edition of 'Hardtalk' where they were interviewing Nick Hanauer, a man who knows something about making money, who proposed doubling the minimum wage some 5 -6 years back was it.

I seem to recall the basis of the argument was that the capitalist model needed to keep selling things and if you didn't pay people enough in the first place then who would be buying the product.

Seemed pretty logical to me.

I have been fortunate in my working career (I believe I fall in to the top 5% although that's not how I see myself) but recognise that the gap between the haves and have-nots has gotten way out of kilter and, as a society, this needs addressing. In the time honoured tradition no one person seems willing to be the first to fall on their sword. In such circumstances I guess the unwilling need 'incentivising'?

Regards

Richard
 
I can never remember how much I earned at any particular point, but I now seem to be quite well paid for doing bugger-all. I do remember how much I paid for particular properties, which comes in handy at dinner parties, or would do if I ever went to any.
 
While many of us desperately try to square the circle of proclaiming our own success without appearing unfairly and exploitatively well off... the Elephant in the Room is that the Tories have presided over, not to say deliberately created, an increasing wealth gap, an increasing North-South Divide, increasing Food Bank dependency, increased homelessness,crumbling infrastructure, failing public services, rail chaos, child poverty.. etc.. etc...
All attempts to justify this are simply attempts to defend the indefensible.
 
Joe said:
So Misterdog was right then ?

( or maybe you can come out with another of your odious pithy comments ? )
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Haha, Misterdog said Richard's hourly rate was affordable 'because' it was part time and cash in hand, it's all in the use of the word 'because'. Cash in hand was always less pay than cards in. Pithy and odious enough for a tory boy?
 
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Mullardman said:
While many of us desperately try to square the circle of proclaiming our own success without appearing unfairly and exploitatively well off... the Elephant in the Room is that the Tories have presided over, not to say deliberately created, an increasing wealth gap, an increasing North-South Divide, increasing Food Bank dependency, increased homelessness,crumbling infrastructure, failing public services, rail chaos, child poverty.. etc.. etc...
All attempts to justify this are simply attempts to defend the indefensible.
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In fairness it could be argued that, as a country, we’ve been living beyond our means for decades and it was bound to catch up with us at some point?

If one has £5 in one’s pocket just how
much can one spend?

Regards

Richard
 
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