Too many young people find doing a day's work 'stressful', says Liz Kendall
Too many young people find doing a day's work 'stressful', says Liz Kendall
Survey by DWP finds almost half of people on benefits say they cannot work
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When you wake up early, start a long commute, work in a shit job (often with unpredictable hours), have an unpaid lunch break, work some more in your understaffed company, then start the long commute back home to your parents house because you can't afford a place of your own, then yeah, I can imagine that's stressful.
And it gets more so when you open social media or news and it's always the privileged or the elderly (often they're even one and the same) constantly shaming youth for being horrible lazy pieces of shit who won't lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
The increase in minimum wage is a great thing. As is the incoming increase in workers rights. I won't sit and pretend Labour are doing nothing. But more needs to be done if you want a mentally healthy workforce.
Just saying "too many find XYZ stressful" without detailing how you plan to change that isn't helping.
I want workers to earn more, but can you really regulate the economy into being better like this?
The cost of living is insane, but the relative pay per hour of a worker competed to anywhere in Europe is already pretty high. Our current minimum wage is 25% higher than Germany, 28% higher than France, 81% for Spain, and 318% compared to somewhere lile the Czech Republic. Our economy is already stalled out, It's already prohibitively expensive to run a company in the UK, and I don't think making employees cost more will stimulate the economy.
Also if minimum wage rises aggressively then I think all that will happen is we'll get a wage spiral upwards and companies will hire fewer and fewer peoeple. We saw a bit of this as we were coming out of covid as a reaction to inflation at the time. The concern is if wages do inflate quicjly, then that drivea prices higher, which results in people demanding higher wages, ect.
Tackling the actual living costs, housing, utility, food, I think that's the only way to go about this. Anything like a minimum wage increase just rolls the snowball down the road, and it will 100% be bigger when you reach it again.
Our minimum wage is indeed fairly high, and the taxes that low earners pay is very low, but we do have problems. Wage compression in this country isn't particularly good. Most people are either minimum wage or close to it.
Even a lot of highly skilled jobs aren't highly paid, it's a problem for the economy, for tax revenue, and for encouraging workers to go for better jobs/strive for progression. I don't know what the government can do about it, but the answer certainly isn't to pin it on young people and imply they're lazy.
But one thing the government can definitely impact is what you mention at the end of your comment: government policy can certainly help bring down the big costs like property costs (both for people and businesses), energy, water, council tax.
How do you even deal with wage compression? It feels like it's ingrained socially at this point, people just seem willing to accept that pay because there's no alternative. I know that for public sector jobs it's a tricky balancing act where the government can't increase a salary for roles in 1 Civil Service grade as it may disincentivise workers in another role at the same grade. That probably hasn't helped when highly skilled roles that require decades of experience are tiered similarly to a role that may only take 6 months of training, where that high skill role wage is being constrained by that lower skill role. Perhaps that's had a wider effect of bringing the perceived value down? I haven't spent any time really thinking about this though, if you have any resources on this, I'd love to give them a read/watch.
Also sorry if my comments felt like I was implying young people are lazy, that wasn't what I was getting at at all. I think the apathy that young people feel is absolutely valid, and even workers who are in their late 50's who have been hit by redundancy are feeling this apathy intensely as they may not see any opportunities that allows them to provide for their families due to the general outlook of things.
So what do you suggest then? I’m more skilled and have more responsibility than I did 15 years ago, yet I’m still earning the same figure.
I don't have that many answers, but I'll give it a go.
I think we need to come down extremely hard on landlords, potentially crippling their income stream. They chose an investment, and all investments carry risk, the risk in this case is that too many people can't afford housing, and the government has to step in and heavily regulate those who profiteer off of basic shelter. This would apply to anyone with rental properties, second homes, long term investment opportunities, ect.
Along side that, a shakeup to planning permission. Fuck NIMBYism, sorry but you don't get a say when people are paying 80% of their income on the bare essentials. From the top down, mandate construction of new housing in an aggressive manor. After Thatcher absolutely fucked us by forcing the local councils to sell off their council houses with the start of austerity, we've been at a ludicrous deficit. I think the figure I was reading is we need to be building about 400,000 houses a year and then in 5 years time, we'll get "close" to fixing the lack of supply that we're faced with now
Where does this money come from for that? I dunno, I would guess borrowing like we have done. It's risky as hell, but it's better than the current risk where we borrow against our rise in GDP, just hoping we outpace the loan rate without any long term plan to reduce the cost of living. Failing that, a wealth tax could maybe be possible? In the tune of 0.5% or so. That would generate an insane amount of revenue, but it would risk foreign investors looking unfavorably towards the UK. It would look risky for their assets, so foreign investment may fall in a dangerous way, maybe this isn't the best plan? I just have no idea, it's not my area of knowledge.
I think the above could be enough to trigger an actual wealth transfer. By dramatically reducing the cost of living, people will actually have disposable income. Income that can go into buying things. Say you work selling clothing, your customers suddenly having 50% more of their paycheques to spend is like the ideal situation, now they actually have the funds to buy your wares. With that higher income, well now you can hire more staff, you can pay your staff more also. You're not having to work to such a fine margin as economically your customers aren't as screwed just trying to survive.
I have no idea if this is all viable to be clear, I hope that I've come to some solid conclusions and ideas here, I'd love to hear pushback on all of that as well as I'm sure I've made some wack assumptions.
The last time any of those things were won by the working class they had come home angry and fed up fighting a war, and were ready to demand at least some concessions from the ruling class. These concessions were granted because the capitalists were terrified that an even angrier working class that knew how to use weapons and fight in an army would lead to a 1917 Russian revolution situation.
Until the same style of conditions exist I don't think the working class are in any kind of place to just demand better from the capitalist class. Hopefully the next time we don't just accept a bribe and let the next generation(s) eat shit while lapping it up.
You're putting decent wages, companies health, economy growth and inflation as only one of them can win. Boohoo, the choice should be easy, it's human well being first.
These things are not even opposed to each other. It's been proved time and over time again that wages rising stimulate the economy because when poor people have more income it doesn't go to savings, they buy more stuff.