Rjan:
With a pay increase, you never lose more at the checkout than you gain in wages.
It’s one of the big lies of neoliberal economics that workers should be concerned to keep their wages down, simply so that prices will be cheaper.
If workers were paid nothing at all, prices in the shops would still be non-zero, to pay for the cost of the boss still taking his cut.
^ This.
In addition to the lie that inflation is wage led and the double standard that for private business the name of the game is charging as much as possible for as little as possible and calling that profit.While for employed workers that all conveniently changes to vice versa in the form of the expectation of as much work as possible for the least possible wages paid and for the employed worker ‘profit’ then conveniently becomes a dirty word.
Fergie47:
If communist Corbyn manages to get to number 10, tht
en he intends to increase apprentices pay to £10 ph…most apprentice are I guess from 16 to 20 years old. That then, by theory, should put the average lorry driver on what. £25 to £30 ph for his skill and experience ?
Sure when they Finnish there apprenticeship they won’t be on much more than that
albion:
From an (now ex) employer’s pov, it really doesn’t matter what you get paid. Corbyn could put the minimum wage up to £100.00 an hour and then say truck drivers got £120.00-140.00 per hour; what matters is if it’s in line with everyone else and as long as my competitors are paying their staff around £130.00, then it really doesn’t make any difference. Trouble is that you will find that factory workers will be on £105.00-120.00 and lawyers will be on £800.00 an hour so the status quo will stay the same.
That’s why you have aggressively progressive taxation, so that any boss who tries to make use of such highly paid labour and bids the price up will be howling.
It also usually forces companies to compete for skilled labour on quality of terms and conditions rather than just price, so that the quality (as well as the pay) of jobs increases - and which often isn’t very costly.
And one of the main ways to economise on highly paid labour is usually just to simplify or steady the operation, whereas increasingly erratic or “flexible” modes of production almost invariably leads to attacks on workers (who increasingly have to be flexible without pay, for example without redundancy money, on-call money, shift allowances, and so on) and it massively increases the amount of professionals who have to be involved to manage a system with endless contingencies, micro-optimisations, masses of paperwork, and little overall rhythm.
robroy:
I can do better than Corbyn’s promises …When I’m Prime Minister we’ll (or rather you ) will.all be on bloody good wages,.proper night out money, and you’ll no longer have any parking probs.
Beer will go down, all football matches will be on tv, Newcastle Utd will be Govt subsidised to Champions league level, and Holly Willoughby and Rachel Riley will be my very loyal P.A.s …because let’s face it I sure as hell have more chance of getting into no10 than that [zb] idiot.
I’ll vote for you but we’ll have to fight over Rachel Riley
forget the plastic, bring on the glass bottles I made good money returning them in my youth, so could top up the pension considerably, tax free as well,
…When I’m Prime Minister we’ll (or rather you 
) will.all be on bloody good wages,.proper night out money, and you’ll no longer have any parking probs.
loyal P.A.s 
…because let’s face it I sure as hell have more chance of getting into no10 than that [zb] idiot. 