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Workers in the UK have suffered the biggest fall in wages among the world's richest countries since the financial crisis, research has suggested.
Between 2007 and 2015 wages in the UK fell by 10.4%, a drop equalled only by Greece, the analysis by the TUC [Trades Union Congress] found.
Women's pay in particular needs to be boosted, the union body said. Women earn on average 19.2% less than men, according to the latest official data.
The Treasury said the TUC's analysis did not fully reflect living standards.
The UK is the joint biggest faller on pay in 29 countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - a forum for wealthy countries who work together to promote financial growth and social wellbeing.
The UK, Greece and Portugal were the only three OECD countries that saw real wages fall, according to the research complied by the TUC.
Source: BBC News
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Friday July 29 2016, @06:15PM
Yes, they most certainly do enslave people. Don't act like there isn't collusion between companies to create desperate hungry labor pools caused by paying them suppressed wages without benefits for so long. With corrupt laws taking away all abilities for organized labor to effectively strike, there is absolutely no way to fight back against the Wallmarts of this country. They prevent it through law, they prevent it through PR companies, they prevent through expensive anti-union consultation firms. Don't act like you don't know about the Pinkertons. Organized labor is not unfamiliar with murders and assassinations within its membership. Educate yourself on the history of labor before you speak of your putrid asshole.
"Living Wages" are not a fantasy you fuck, and they have EVERYTHING to do with actual living as you so ignorantly put it. Would you work for less then you NEED to survive? Why? Do you love your employer so much that you will sacrifice for them like a parent does for a child?
A LIVING WAGE is defined as:
So what are you proposing you evil fuck? We don't deserve normal standards of living from a full-time job, or for pay to be directly proportional to it when not worked a full day? That's what you say is a fantasy that I can't have. A NORMAL STANDARD OF LIVING. The Wage "Slaves" are you so vehemently and ignorantly deny exist, work for LESS THAN A NORMAL STANDARD OF LIVING.
Now, that's just fucking stupid. Yeah, we shouldn't play nanny for stupid people........ unless it is destroying society. If you think creating huge populations of people unable to afford a NORMAL STANDARD OF LIVING doesn't destroy society, then obviously you define society far different than I do. Your society includes a slave caste whereby their labor is exploited to create the HIGHER STANDARDS OF LIVING for a few. Do you enjoy spending so much on the prisons now required to house us all?
The financial definition of living wage is (generally):
a standard generally meaning that a person working forty hours a week, with no additional income, should be able to afford the basics for quality of life, such as, food, shelter, utilities, transport, health care, minimal recreation, one course a year to upgrade their education, and childcare. However, in many cases education, saving for retirement, and less commonly legal fees and insurance, or taking care of a sick or elderly family member are not included.
None of these are ransom-like demands from entitled and unreasonable workers.
FOOD - Yeah, you can go to fucking hell if you think a worker doesn't deserve good food for a good day's work. Yet, 1 in 5 children go hungry each day in great grand ol' America, the "Greatest Country on Earth".
SHELTER Umm, yes again, that big fat spike in hell is meant for *your* asshole. Go sit on it if you think we don't deserve basic shelter. Not asking for a fucking penthouse in New York, just something fucking basic. Like 700sqft at least and a private bathroom. People deserve the benefits of advanced technology, not being told for their efforts they need to sleep in their car. See San Fransisco for an example of true slave labor pools whereby a skilled job can still leave you homeless.
UTILITIES Yes, again, people fully deserve electrical and water hook-ups. Actually, this one is just fucking retarded because why would a landlord ever invest in a structure that didn't? Truth is, this isn't actually such a huge burden... once you get rid of the parasitic fuckers in corporations like PGE where they demand 400% profit increases over 2 years for their shareholders. At least with services we consider a utility, profit has to have a strict ceiling when Capitalism is fucking nowhere to be found. When PGE are the only assholes allowed to exist, well, then they need to be put on a fucking diet.
HEALTH CARE Again, why create yourself as an instant ward of the state by not demanding what you need for medical? Of course this one is superfucked because the greedy fucking assholes in our medical system demand that ~60c on the dollar goes to them, for no functional of meaningful additions to the patients care. That's according to many studies comparing medical systems around the world. We have less than shit afforded to the average person in my country, and that's a pathetic joke being the "Greatest Country On Earth". We deserve health care and its fucking moronic to not include it. Moreover, Cuba makes us look like ignorant, greedy, cruel, and callous people to one another when their medical system is lauded by the whole fucking world (WHO) as a medical system to be learned from. But, but, but they're pinko fucking commies!
TRANSPORT I can see this one too, but at the same time this means at least a minimum for public transit to me at the very least.
The things you would deny people are also the things fucking killing us in the forms of expensive social programs we already argue about bitterly. Your too fucking stupid to realize that all you need to do is pay people what they already fucking deserve. A LIVING WAGE is a human fucking right, not a fantasy you fucking butthead.
Ohh, they're not excuses. They're the reason why one day we may be pointing guns at each other trying to blow each others brains out; You the corporate apologist, and me the desperate citizen who hasn't seen good days in two decades. Keep it up. Your world is about to die by fire. Yeah, keep demanding we that don't have the right to press for NORMAL STANDARDS OF LIVING, or the rights to organize effectively.
Civil War is highly likely to be coming. Choose a side. I suggest you be on the one promulgating normal standards of living myself.....
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 30 2016, @12:56AM
My view is that one can easily fund this list (when one scales it back to a sensible level) on a minimum wage job (especially, if they live with family or friends who also work). And if that person is not utter shit as an employee, they can use the experience from that minimum wage job to move up to a much better paying job. And if your employer isn't paying enough for you to live in a hugely expensive urban area, then move to a cheaper area and get a new job - that'll drop all the costs on your list. It's not rocket surgery.
Civil War is highly likely to be coming. Choose a side. I suggest you be on the one promulgating normal standards of living myself.....
And of course, there's the typical fantasies of violence when you don't get your way. Not that getting your way would prevent violence. After all, employers won't be any more likely to employ. Standards of living won't become any more affordable or unemployed and underemployed people any more likely to afford those things you deem necessary, and society won't become all that much wealthier to afford your frivolous gimmicks.
My take is still that we need more employers even if that means giving more benefits to rich people you don't like and we don't need all this expensive crap you want. Only two items on your list are at all significant, shelter and health care. And we can reasonably scale each back to living in a cheap area and health care that gives us a healthy worker. You want more than that, then you should pay for it yourself with your money.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday August 01 2016, @08:49PM
Oh, go fuck yourself. The violence is coming because Panem et Circenses is broken and you missed the most fundamental part you sick twisted fuck:
A day's work deserves a living wage, which is for a NORMAL STANDARD OF LIVING. Hugely expensive urban area? How did it get that way you retarded fuck? So, just leave? I guess you think gentrification is just a fucking myth right? Do you not see that the situation you describe just keeps pushing people lower and lower? Do you just assume that workers with absolutely no savings anymore, just can afford all the costs to pick up and leave?
It's not going to be violence because we can't get our way, it will be violence because were no longer able to survive. You still sit there like an evil fuck thinking that all these soon-to-be-gutting-you-on-the-street people are simply suffering from an immature sense of entitlement. NOBODY WORKING OVER 40 HOURS A WEEK IS SUFFERING FROM ENTITLEMENT YOU FUCK.
Food is not significant? Are you fucking stupid? When commodity prices go up, people can't fucking afford food. THAT'S WHY 1 IN 5 CHILDREN GO HUNGRY EACH DAY.
I'm going to personally celebrate when civil war comes, because I know men like you will be gutted in the street. It's coming.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:18AM
A day's work deserves a living wage, which is for a NORMAL STANDARD OF LIVING. Hugely expensive urban area? How did it get that way you retarded fuck? So, just leave? I guess you think gentrification is just a fucking myth right? Do you not see that the situation you describe just keeps pushing people lower and lower? Do you just assume that workers with absolutely no savings anymore, just can afford all the costs to pick up and leave?
I don't care in the least about gentrification. You don't have a right to living in an expensive location. And no, I don't buy that moving elsewhere pushes people down. And yes, I believe workers with no savings can move quite easily.
It's not going to be violence because we can't get our way, it will be violence because were no longer able to survive. You still sit there like an evil fuck thinking that all these soon-to-be-gutting-you-on-the-street people are simply suffering from an immature sense of entitlement. NOBODY WORKING OVER 40 HOURS A WEEK IS SUFFERING FROM ENTITLEMENT YOU FUCK.
I have a solution here. Get the fuck out of the way and let employers gainfully employ people who need employment.
I'm going to personally celebrate when civil war comes, because I know men like you will be gutted in the street. It's coming.
And once again, we see the vicious fantasizing about violence.
Your ideas are stillborn. We'll never increase employment by making it much more costly and onerous to employ people. We'll never have the wealth for a basic income or other such social safety nets,if we chase away or fail to create the wealth that would fund those schemes. And of course, we have rampant corporatism because your ideas undermine the employment contract in a way that favor the enormous businesses and the rule of law so that the wealthy have an even more unfair playing field than ever (when laws can be overlooked for righteous excuses, so can they be overlooked for more venal reasons like bribery).
Surely, it's not too much to ask that you stop being part of the problem?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday August 02 2016, @09:23PM
You are the problem. Period.
God, you are so fucking stupid. You keep seeing it as a matter of "rights" and entitlement. Pull your head out of your ass. When rent prices go up by 40% how the fuck did that happen? You think property owners have the right to MAKE a location expensive overnight? That's what happened. The person you insult and degrade was working 40+ HOURS A WEEK. You have no ability to assail them or their character at all, and it only makes you look like a fucking asshole. So this person working for a living, that by definition, deserves a living wage, was doing just fine. Then commodity prices go up, rents go up, everything is going up. The utility company demands more money in rate increases, that were only supposed to pay for maintenance and repairs, but then instead made 400% more profit for shareholders. Repairs went undone and people died. Not hyperbole you stupid fuck, but actual facts of life in California.
So everything is going up, and that is perfectly fine with your black-hearted ass. It's Capitalism with a big ol' YUGE fucking 'C', and there is nothing wrong about it at all. It's in fact morally fucking superior. So all of those executives, shareholders, and property owners were doing nothing wrong at all raising the prices..... except creating locations that are now wholly unaffordable to the middle class at all, let alone the newly and rapidly developing "service" class.
Yet, when all these prices go up, stupid fucks like yourself call these workers "entitled", "privileged", "left leaning bleeding-heart liberals", and basically assassinate their character when they try to get raises . Executives and managers are raising prices... but not to raise up workers wages to afford costs of living increases. You damn well know that costs of living increases in wages not keeping up with inflation is a huge fucking issue in this country. It's systemic and torturous. Executives and managers don't give a fuck, cuz like I said before, the Walmarts collude to create desperate labor pools. You can't complain about your wage to much, or put up too much of a fight, because the labor pool is over supplied and the job market has dwindled. You may even be asked to train your own H1B visa replacement before you go.
All of the decisions that made these places more expensive, which is practically everywhere, were from stupid greedy fucks with your kind of heart.
Ohh, and you believe workers with no savings can move very easily? Now your just being deliberately stupid :) You damn well fucking know it costs money to move, which is why sometimes people have no choice but to abandon property to be seized by landlords. We're not talking about moving a mile or two away, which could require a truck rental anyways. Gentrification means people commuting two hours into San Fransisco to work their service job because a landlord raised their rent by $500 in two months. They can't find another job, so they need to move hours away. That means gas, and obtaining a truck.
So you're completely fucking full of shit about that.
Ohh, that's right. The stupid fucking myth handed to you as propaganda and talking points for the brainwashed and stupid. "Regulations are what hurt the industry, and if they just weren't there, jobs would come back".....
It wasn't regulations that made it more expensive, it was the successes of organized labor. Then after completely hijacking Congress and fucking over our trade policies, it became a simple matter to outsource fucking everything. You really think an unfettered marketplace is going to magically bring jobs back on shore? You think it will magically make corporations start paying living fucking wages again? You think they will become so reasonable that organized labor could never recruit? You're too fucking stupid to realize that for the past ~150 years that organized labor has been fighting because they didn't have living wages. It wasn't workers complaining they wanted a 3rd TV, a 2nd car, or that extra month of vacation. It was workers complaining that they were dying, that there were unsafe conditions, that they couldn't feed their families on what was offered. Look into the history and you will see these were never unreasonable requests by entitled people, but reasonable requests by hard working Americans that deserved what they were asking for.
You're a fucking moron. Those jobs won't come back unless we slap huge fucking tariffs on nearly everything coming into port. Then maybe over 10-20 years will see our local industries come back and be retrained to the point we used to be. For 150 years industry, shareholders, and the elites have pushed back against anything preventing their exploitation of the workers. Their monied influence in politics has assured their ability to hamper organized labor, and then bypass it directly by outsourcing everything to countries where their corrupt practices reign supreme.
I guess you conveniently ignore the plight of the foreign worker in U.S owned industries? Fuck them right, if they really had issues they could revolt in their own country?
It's not a fantasy, but a prediction. You won't support the unassailable moral position of getting living wages for a full day's work, and your simply to blinded by your complete lack of empathy to understand that it is what they deserve. When you destroy the middle class in this way, you are in fact destroying society, which was your original asinine complaint. I thought Trump sounded fucking stupid attacking Gold Star families, but you take the fucking cake by excluding food from living wages. I guess you disagreed with the study showing dramatically shortened telomeres in the DNA of poor urban people versus their richer suburban counterparts? Food is important you fuck, and anybody working 40+ hours a week at anything deserves to eat.
We're not British you evil fuck, we're Americans. What that does mean? When we all look around at each other and realize that there is just a poor slave class and the rich upper class, and that things are so bad you're at the bottom level of the Maslow scale, people will revert to desperate animals and the Wild West will return . You will see looting, rioting start to happen, and things will degrade in general. Social services will start breaking down, since evil fucksticks like you keep voting to gut them and underfund them anyways. That tragedy is only eclipsed by the fact a living wage would allow for most social programs to shrink to fractions of their sizes. Smaller government is a good thing, and living wages engender that.
It is you and your stupidity that is creating this new desperate class of slave workers, disenfranchised, and hopeless. Are you so stupid you can't see the inherent dangers of this?
All because you can't possibly accept the idea of a living wage to engender a healthy middle class. Not McMansions, but modest living that is being denied most people. It's really simple, but you can't see anything beyond entitled workers asking for something they don't deserve. Which is really tragic, because if working 40-80 hours a week doesn't deserve these things, then what does?
Are you saying there is a permanent class of people, the bulk of us, that just don't deserve these things at all? We're so stupid, and fucked off in school so much (even though a huge number of the poor now are very intelligent and educated), that we're not deserving of basic human dignity?
Be careful when you create a slave class underneath you to service you at your whim; Sometimes they revolt and kill their masters/oppressors. Keep thinking that is violent fantasy and not well founded fears about future events.
You dying would help solve the problem. That's actually true, I'm not trying to be mean. If people like you got out of the way, and could start surviving off a day's work again, we might get our country back.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:01PM
You're a fucking moron. Those jobs won't come back unless we slap huge fucking tariffs on nearly everything coming into port. Then maybe over 10-20 years will see our local industries come back and be retrained to the point we used to be. For 150 years industry, shareholders, and the elites have pushed back against anything preventing their exploitation of the workers. Their monied influence in politics has assured their ability to hamper organized labor, and then bypass it directly by outsourcing everything to countries where their corrupt practices reign supreme.
Then there is this bit of Trumpness "We'll build a wall and make China pay for it."
Be careful when you create a slave class underneath you to service you at your whim; Sometimes they revolt and kill their masters/oppressors. Keep thinking that is violent fantasy and not well founded fears about future events.
I create a slave class? When is your slave class ever going to be an employer when all they know how to do is suckle at the government teat? My policies would encourage create and growth of new employers and thus, create of new avenues for advancement. I think we need to understand who really is the slave-maker here.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:18AM
It's not love you stupid fuck, it's being able to live. Why the fuck would you work for an employer for less than what you need to survive? Ohh, yeah, that's right. Employment is voluntary, but if you deliberately manipulate the labor pool you have desperate hungry people willing to work for less because they have no other choice afforded to them. There are less jobs because of outsourcing to other countries, where there is no fucking way on Earth you can argue that it is fair and correct. We're not meant to compete with other desperate people in 3rd world hell holes. That's impossible, and your fucking solution (yes, yours), is that we move to these countries where the prices are cheaper.
What higher costs are we thrusting upon them? From the very beginning you stupid fuck those costs were about increasing safety, reducing pollution, offering a living wage. These are not unreasonable increases in costs at all, and you allow the corporations to leave this country to exploit others. So not only are we exploiting a foreign population for cheap labor, we're shooting ourselves in the foot over here eliminating these jobs that used to be the core of the middle class. Union factory jobs were what made this country as great as it was, and it wasn't until the late 70's and corrupt regulations that you saw everything being outsourced.
Yeah, nice how you completely ignore how there are workers and executives. They'll lay off workers who are too expensive, but somehow executives keep getting paid more and more. They're not worth it, and you fucking know it. What did we get from the geniuses again? Corrupt practices, they outsourced everything to foreign countries, performed massive amounts of malfeasance (Unaoil/Mosseck Fonseca).
You're being so fucking simplistic, it has to be deliberate ignorance.
There is your idiocy. Putting the tariffs up has nothing do with building a wall and having China pay for it. It means that we no longer allow those jobs to be performed in China at all. Eliminate all H1B work, and then slap tariffs on everything higher and higher, till surprise, surprise, the market reacts by bringing factories back to the U.S. That means union jobs come back, and that means our young people will start being trained again on how to do these kinds of work. You've heard of brain drain right you stupid fucker? Well, are we just going to forget how to make things? Sit back and be reliant on China, and who else becomes cheaper than China eventually?
Trade is supposed to be about us buying Italian meats, French cheeses and wines, etc. By it's very nature it is supposed to cost more than anything domestic, since you know, it's actually coming from fucking France and Italy. What we don't do though, is make farmers here throw away perfectly good food so that we can start importing more and more Spanish cherries to fuck up our local markets. Trade is not supposed to be about us having our local economies compete with foreign economies, and point in fact, that's what trade policies are supposed to handle. We get the benefits of trade without destroying our society.
Outsourcing jobs wholesale is just fucking stupid........ unless the whole point is to gentrify the entire fucking U.S to the point where we all moved to foreign countries to survive as expats, and you greedy fuckers turn the whole thing into Dubai.
There is your utter stupidity and bigotry revealed. None of us want to actually suckle at the government teat as you so offensively put it. Nobody working 40+ hours, and who is also on the government teat, is at fault in any way, shape, or form. YOU ARE AT FAULT, with the support of policies that allow Walmart to hire people as instant-wards-of-the-state. Why does Walmart get to higher somebody that instantly has to go on food stamps? Why does a major airline (UNITED IIRC), train their new pilots to *NOT* wear their uniforms when paying for groceries with food stamps?
That's what a living wage handles, but your too fucking stupid to see the whole picture. You literally lack the intelligence to hold these concepts in your mind I believe. The only thing you can see is letting businesses loose to enact the complete fucking myth of the trickle-down economy. Seriously, do think about Reagan while you masturbate?
We won't be on social programs if we could just get paid a living wage, and government could get smaller. There is nothing wrong with that at all. We have enough money with a living wage for:
- Food. The food stamp program can shrink down by at least half, probably more. How many people on food stamps are actually employed? How many of them have full hours in the aggregate over 2-3 jobs? You damn well fucking know that all you had to do was pay these people what is required to buy food. It's not fucking complicated, and once you remove the super luxury items, most people's food bills are fairly comparable.
- Shelter. Link this directly to the average property price, and nobody can ever be hurt by attempts for gentrification ever again. Limit how fast rents can raise through good public policy, and establish a minimum for the area. That's not fucking McMansions either, but just the basic, or average.
- Medical. Stop letting businesses get away with the 29 hours bullshit. Anybody over the age of 25 getting more than 1 hour has to have a health plan covered. Period. Either that, or repeal Obama Care entirely since that is what forces people to get insurance. Jobs for teenagers was never meant to be a market in which 50 years old competed with them. You shouldn't be allowed to be paid less than living wage UNLESS you can prove your subsidized by your parents or other incomes. So part time work with 16-24 years olds is preserved, but they can't fuck with the middle class anymore.
Those 3 things right there represent a huge chunk of the social programs, and a ton of people on the government teat as you put it. We don't have to be on the teat if you just fucking paid us.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 03 2016, @01:49AM
or repeal Obama Care entirely since that is what forces people to get insurance
First sensible thing you've said all day. There's plenty wrong with US health care. No one disputes this. But Obamacare was deceptive, unconstitutional, and destructive from the start. There hasn't been a year since its creation that it hasn't impaired our ability to provide for ourselves (that's despite it still not being fully implemented) or broken fundamental law.
Jobs for teenagers was never meant to be a market in which 50 years old competed with them.
Nonsense. One of the many benefits to working as a teenager is that you get to work with older people (you know, the people you "compete" with). You're not going to learn maturity hanging out at the local school prison.
Those 3 things right there represent a huge chunk of the social programs, and a ton of people on the government teat as you put it. We don't have to be on the teat if you just fucking paid us.
I guess you missed my observation where my plan does that and yours doesn't? I have to wonder at this point whose side you really are on? How many poor workers are you willing to kill for your goals?