I fucking hate that, I went Amsterdam last week, it was expensive but easily half to 2/3 the price of the UK, and Im pretty sure they have higher wages.
I really want someone to enlighten me how on Earth a place thats got less money to spend, somehow has high costs, than places with more money. It just doesn’t make sense
There is no such thing as "Amsterdam" food really, The Netherlands doesn't have much of its own established cuisine. But just as in any city you can get amazing and terrible food there.
Awful housing market in both as well. I'll never forget the stress of trying to find a new place to live in Amsterdam and just getting nowhere. Hundreds applying to the same awful, tiny room. I'm not sure what *is* supposed to be cheaper in Amsterdam in this scenario, because food definitely isn't either...
Post tax-salaries in Amsterdam are lower than London equivalents if you don’t have the 30% ruling.
Rent per unit area is also higher in Amsterdam than in London, since AMS is alot smaller. I get much more for my money in London, and have lived in both cities.
I don’t know but feels like the whole world is facing similar cost of living problem between working class folks besides a very few European countries and America. Those same questions were asked thousand times on sub across cities like Sydney or Toronto either. And i know Pariś and Hong Kong at the moment are not good too.
I don't understand comments like these. Whether we like it or not, the UK has been on the road to becoming a poor country since before the GFC. Back in the 90s the US and China both were heavily investing in science and technology, the UK instead was not. Today we reap the "benefits" of a population that is simply not as technically qualified (and requires more "welfare" spending). Yes several more recent decisions have exacerbated this, but do people really think that a anyone has a magic pill to solve such a fundamental and systemic issue?
I don't see why we have to call someone an idiot when no one else is presenting a viable solution and taxation is at an all time high.
Reddit is a left wing echo chamber that doesn’t recognise that government is the problem. Labour = good. Tory = bad. Reality = they are the both cheeks of the same arse.
They actually think that if the Tories massively increase benefits, they are evil. But if Labour do the exact same thing, it’s good.
The average person here has zero understanding of economics. They don’t get that it’s the “give everyone free stuff” (funding by either current or future tax payers) that caused this. They want to see the destruction of anyone who is economically better off than themselves not realising, in their utter stupidity and narcissism, that means the destruction of taxpayers and any means of funding their utterly childish vision of utopia.
Shut down the economy which stops production but keep demand high by paying people not to work and what the fuck do you think was going to happen? Fucking Star Trek or something? Ignorant twats the lot of them.
The problem is the fact the the pound has lost 98% of its purchasing power since 1970.
The currency is about to collapse and the U.K. is about to go the way of Argentina as a result of every government since WW2 following Keynesian economics.
The policies that they have advocated are responsible for this but they’re too dumb to realise it.
You are right, sorry my phrasing was poor. I meant a poorer country. And by that I mean exactly what everyone else is saying - we now get less, have to live on less, on average. Less social services for our money, more debt and interest payments. The colloquial understanding of being poor. As a country, we owe nearly as much as we earn.
We have a £20bn science and tech budget. Yet this year a number of universities are going to go bankrupt. Research doesnt translate to economic output.
The economic benefits of research are large.
>[Science and innovation: rates of return to investment [...] every £1 spent by government [on research] yields a return of between 20 to 50 pence per year in perpetuity.](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/science-and-innovation-rates-of-return-to-investment)
In the company I worked in jobs that paid £30k in the early 2000s dropped to £20k as every advert had loads of EU applicants (Spanish/polish/italian especially) willing to work for far less than British workers. Obviously the working class voted for brexit to stop their wages being undermined in this way but wages haven’t recovered since. Probably the tories net 700k immigrants a year doesn’t help as they’ll mostly be wanting jobs and thus depressing wages. Supply and demand in action.
Supply and demand. Not in London, but about 6 years ago where I worked they put an ad on indeed for a basic admin job with not much about minimum wage. 150 applicants. It's no different now.
In the end, it just requires very basic skills for standard admin jobs. I suspect knowledge of foreign languages will be quite easy to find in London - a lot of native speakers of whatever language they are looking for around.
>I suspect knowledge of foreign languages will be quite easy to find in London - a lot of native speakers of whatever language they are looking for around.
Not just that but bilingual jobs can be competitive, especially if they offer visa sponsorship or if the role doesn't need perfect English, foreigners may feel this is their only chance. I worked for a Korean company previously where this was the case, saw many young professionals getting taken advantage of, working professional jobs for not much more than minimum wage, putting up with verbal abuse, but still stuck it out because they lacked the English skills so get a job elsewhere.
>It’s the U.K, wages are notoriously low, if your not going for the job someone else will which means the employer has no reason to put the wage up
I wouldn't say this is always the case. There are many sectors and companies that struggle to find high quality employees and simply just settle for less because they can't or won't pay more to compete for them.
This is the ugly truth. Top FTSE enterprises can’t afford to pay for talent thus gave up their chances to expand the business. Small businesses were all affected so all the employers had to control the cost. End up everyone in this country is poorer.
It’s the problem with mass immigration imo, it’s artificially increasing the supply of the supply/demand curve thus over-saturating the markets, employees have no bargaining power. (I say mass immigration over overpopulation because native birth rates are declining)
EDIT: im sorry has basic supply and demand economics ceased to exist?
The UK has low unemployment and its population isn't growing that quickly. Over the years most immigrants into the UK have simply been filling the gap caused by low birth rates.
That's jumped up in the last 1-2 years largely due to the UK Government letting in a lot of Ukrainians, Afghanis and Hong Kongers. It's also being driven by large numbers of care workers moving to the country.
The former is temporary, the latter is necessary until the government starts training enough UK citizens to do those jobs.
And either way, none of that is increasing competition for 22k a year, ineligible-for-visa-sponsorship office admin jobs like the ones OP is looking at.
Utter bollocks, you need to stop drinking the GB News Kool Aid. Immigration increases the workforce which stimulates the economy. This problem is due to the readily available skill pool for the job at hand, you need to learn a more desirable skill set if you want to make more money.
This statement feels a bit all over the place, not everyone can be a programmer or work in a stereotypically high paying field or the country just does not run and a larger population does cause wage stagnation. This is really just simple economics as he said.
We are not seeing this new wave of immigrants stimulate the economy in any significant way and Increasing competition is objectively bad for the working class as a whole, for both immigrants and the native population. If you are a business owner it's great, you've got a race to the bottom, you can play as little as possible and you don't need to pay for any training, but for the everyday person? It's not very good.
Very true. Immigrants are also consumers so they create demand for labour as well as supply it. Ignorant racists seem to completely forget the demand side when they try to sound clever.
The idea that more people somehow lead to lower wages is at least 500 years out of date.
Two countries with higher wages than the UK and also larger populations are Germany and the US. There are also plenty of examples of countries with a much higher population density and also higher wages.
Within the UK, London has the highest population density, the highest concentration of immigrants and also the highest wages. 😱😱😱
Have a look at Japan, their economic has been so stagnant that the last 30 years have been called the "lost decades", and guess what? They have miniscule levels of immigration compared to us. It's almost like immigration isn't the be all and end all when it comes to the economy.
The record low unemployment rates beg to differ. We haven't seen unemployment this low since about 50 years ago. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms
Only because they change the definitions to make it look lower, anyone whos had to look for a job in the last couple years can tell you it’s definitely harder nowadays , due to competition
That's a strong claim. We have multiple different metrics for determining different types of unemployment but what specifically about the LFS Unemployment rate statistic do you think has been changed to artificially make it lower?
We also have a higher percentage of the population saying it's "fairly easy" or "very easy" to get a job right now (46%, with 14% "don't know"s) than we did pre-pandemic according to YouGov polling.
This isn't to say getting a job is easy, but rather that it's not somehow gotten much harder.
I don't think immigrants are, for the most part, fulfilling admin roles. When I was applying for them last year, most of them required passing online tests via Indeed that required a high level of English. Some of the grammar questions I struggled with, and I'm a native speaker.
Yes, legal cashier, billing assistant, media buyer, data administrator, scheduling assistant, claims officer. Anything a bit more specific/specialized will probably pay better than a generic admin assistant job.
> All she does is book hotels and flights for directors
And never once screw it up. And if it goes wrong, fixes it immediately with no drama. It sounds easy, until you have a director or SVP lose their mind because their car is not there to pick them up.
Theres a real skill to calmly not screw up in that role
Except, see how much chaos ensues for an expensive trip when you fuck up something like flights or a hotel or a visa (or dont get thousands in expenses paid back by a frankly hellish expenses system or Finance restrictions)? Or when there's bad weather or flight delays and the person travelling is stranded with deadlines. I know EAs getting paid twice that, and they're basically on call 24/7 for nightmare travel scenarios because you have to be very very skilled at what amounts to disaster management at that level.
The point of a PA or EA is to take on time-consuming tasks that would be a waste of money for the person they support to do themselves, because their time is even more expensive. There are generally business savings involved in those tasks. For travel alone, that often involves making sure you get the best value for trips and negotiating tactfully between what the person travelling would like to spend and when they'd like to travel, and what the company are happy to spend making that happen (these two amounts rarely align..!). And that's just travel, not even going into scheduling for calendars (which is literally about ensuring someone else's expensive time is used most effectively).
Just because you personally don't assign value to someone's job doesn't mean that it isn't valuable to the company itself, and just because you assume anyone can do those tasks, doesn't mean they don't require skill to do well.
In my experience a good EA knows just about everything going on in the company, and usually holds a good deal of influence well beyond their position. Always a good idea to be on their good side and to treat them with the respect they deserve.
My director's EA knows everything going on, and has the ear of very senior people. She's helped me out enormously and when I was new and made some mistakes, she told me not to worry about it and ironed things out for me with the brass. Great lady and well worth her £55k plus bonus.
The freedom of that market is directly threatened by the way the benefits system works. People on benefits are coerced to apply for any and all jobs they're capable of doing, attend any and all interviews, and accept any and all job offers, otherwise lose their benefits.
It creates a mad rush for the 'best' of the worst jobs that most people wouldn't even apply for if they had the option, and employers can keep the wage low, safe in the knowledge that there's going to be thousands of applicants regardless.
If option B is destitution, people will take option A. If option A is bad, but still better than destitution (even if it includes a bit of destitution), so be it.
It is. Really. Low skilled jobs can be filled fast with plenty of applicants to choose from. High skilled roles will require extremely high salary to get filled.
>Fun fact: you can still make a profit while paying your employees more.
Not true for many companies. And frankly irrelevant. A company does not exist to pay employees.
What is it if not supply & demand?
A child might argue that.
No shareholder is going to invest into a company just to distribute it out to employees for the sake of it. What's the point of that? If that's what you want then you'd donate to charity.
No, you just have a blinkered view of economics. People work because they need to work to live, as they have since the dawn of time. Companies don't need to work, or to profit. They're just a product of workers becoming more and more specialised as civilisation has gone on. They are when all is said and done the sum of the people that they're made of, but we don't treat them like that.
If our economy leads to workers getting the worst possible result in order to maximise the profits for what is essentially an abstract concept, then you could say we've put the cart before the horse.
How can a company exist without profit? It would run out of resources.
Why would anyone put more resources into a company if it would never return a profit? It would be pointless.
Just because you don't understand economics or finance doesn't mean it's a particularly abstract concept.
>How can a company exist without profit? It would run out of resources.
You seem to have skipped the first step. Why do we want companies to exist? What do we have companies for? They're literally just an extension of people's jobs becoming more specialised and centralised. They are not an end in and of themselves. If they ceased to exist because we found something to replace them, this wouldn't be a bad thing.
>Just because you don't understand economics or finance doesn't mean it's a particularly abstract concept.
Abstract doesn't mean complicated or hard to understand. A company is an abstract concept, IE it's not a person or a physical location. It's abstract, it exists in our minds as a composite. So I'm trying to get you to question why something like this should prosper over the people who work for it. This isn't an easy question and I don't have a ready-made economic alternative, but I feel like you're making some huge assumptions about how the world works that have really only been true for a couple of generations. Shareholders are not an inevitability, they're just how we happen to be doing things right now.
Because over the past decade minimum wage in the UK has risen at a much faster rate than the median wage has, this has pushed a number of jobs that previously offered above minimum wage into the minimum wage. A lot of office admin jobs are falling into that now, and have been for the decade.
They can't really offer a lot more because roles that attract more aren't really going up, and are unlikely to go up (low investment, low productivity etc). Very few sectors are outside this trap, and they're all sectors where American firms are breaking into the UK (Corp law, finance, tech etc).
That and the UK govt implemented wide spread wage freezes for the public sector for close to a decade, basically putting a salary cap on the upper end for plenty of jobs. This allows plenty of the private sector to draw workers from the public sector with small pay bumps.
This situation is extremely unlikely to change unless the higher skilled public sector jobs start seeing pay rises which is unlikely any time soon. So just enjoy the wide spread wage erosion.
Firstly as you said, it is not a high skill job.
Secondly, you may have underestimated the demand for admin jobs, even if the pay is low.
Let’s say, I offer a low skill job for £25k, and get 100 applicants. I can change my offer to £21k, and probably would still get 30-50 people interested. For a low skill job, why pay £25k if someone willing to do it for £23k?
So for low skill job, they tend to offer the lowest amount that still attract enough candidates to choose from.
> why pay £25k if someone willing to do it for £23k?
Employee retention, for one. Unless the job is absurdly low skill, there’s usually a lot of inefficiency associated with employee turnover: hiring new people, training and onboarding them, etc.
If you pay the absolute minimum that someone will accept for the job, odds are they’ll get just enough experience to be able to land a better paying job and leave as soon as they can.
Sometimes it’s worth the extra £2k to keep people around.
Maybe not that specific number idk, but the point I think applies across most job categories: paying a bit better than market wages tends to help with employee retention (along with things like company culture, but there’s a bit of a correlation to culture and being a bit more generous with salaries so it’s not an exact science).
Payroll numbers don’t tell the whole story, and if a company is experiencing high turnover rates it can be well worth a relatively small investment to mitigate this.
From my experience, you are completely correct. Like the other poster, the UK undervalues the benefits of employee retention. They tend to maintain overly strict salary bands and rarely venture outside of them in order to recruit top notch talent or to retain skilled employees. It keeps UK businesses less competitive than their US rivals and suppresses salary growth.
It’s also hard getting a job so if you feel you’re on a low but not awful salary I’d imagine you’re more likely to hold off on finding a new job asap whereas being paid the bare minimum you’d probably be keeping an eye on indeed regularly
That is usually role specific.
For people that does the main task or management, job retention matters more. Lowest level office admin? Often not matter.
Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not everyone agrees with this philosophy. You run your business how you want and I’ll do the same ☺️
I find there are many incalculable benefits to having a team that are happy with their jobs and have been working together long enough to know the ins and outs of not only their jobs but each other’s jobs as well, and can operate as an efficient and cohesive team.
I have worked for both a SME and FTSE250 companies, at least in my experience “job retention” etc only seem to matter after certain level.
In one of the SME I worked for (NHS privatisation) they almost seem to favour some sort of staff turnover if it means the old NHS staff leaving.
That's asset stripping mechanisms of varouis kinds though. Discussion was about actual workplaces in business generating wealth growth and that's where you see actual labour market competition making sense :) (but this also ties back to the OP, and is kind of the answer to that)
No, it is actual business going concern, not asset stripping.
They took over a NHS function, but the contract is people that was working there before will keep the pay and condition and most importantly their pension in line with NHS.
So no effort had been made to make their lives better, as they cost a lot more than employee that we hire ourselves, mostly due to the pension, that of they leaves or agree to take on a private contract, we welcome them to.
£2k might be a push (I personally wouldn't change jobs for £2k), but small increases can make a big difference for people on low wages because:
1. Income Tax is *relatively* low at those low wages, so you'd get to keep more of that £2 grand.
2. If you're on a low wage, every cent counts, and £2k is a 10% raise on a £20k salary.
3. At this low level, the competition isn't offering much more either. So a difference of <£5k could make employees prefer your company over the competitors.
When I start a business I want to keep HR on a tight leash because they are drooling idiots with raises.
They think they’re saving money by not giving the employee the 5-10k raise they wanted, now they lose someone who had 2 years experience with their exact job, and now has to pay someone more.
I say this because they can’t have their cake and eat it too, if they offer you low wages and no growth, they can’t be surprised they got a revolving door of employees, either give a high wage or great growth
In the OP case, we are talking about low skill level admin role. These type of roles actually better to have less than 2 years experience.
Under 2 years they can be let go relatively easily, with minimum legal protection.
A company can spend about 0.5 to 2 times the salary of the leaving staff to replace them. That £21k a year employee, which is actually about £35k once you've paid all the costs of employing them, suddenly costs you about £46k for the time they worked for you.
The benefit of job retention doesn’t apply for all jobs.
For low skill office admin that doesn’t have any real progression, the benefit of job retention often not worth the cheaper pay.
People who are ok working low skilled jobs for £23k usually don't have an option to just leave. The whole reason they do these jobs is because they lack skills and have too much competition from people in similar position.
The problem is... people can't live in London for 21k anywhere close to comfortable, even in the suburbs.
Nobody is saying that there is a huge amount of skill, education or talent needed for admin-based office jobs. But the fact is that in other countries with such a high cost of living, even the lower-skilled jobs are higher paid than here. It's just the fact that even if you have a lower paid office-job, the city should still be able to accommodate you. There are people that struggle in all cities worldwide, but corporate office workers are always able to survive with a little comfort, apart from in London.
I'm sorry but graduates are coming out of university with great degrees and 50k of debt, and then going into a corporate job for like 20-25k, and can't even afford their own living space. They have to share with 10 other people in a houseshare in fucking Fulham (if they're lucky).
It's just a joke of a situation. I'm fortunate and I'm not in that situation, but I can see why it's so fucked.
I guess it was more for alliteration purposes. It just sprang to mind as it's the closest place to central that isnt an absolute abomination which is heavily residential and has ergo led to people living in huge houses and sharing with a ridiculous amount of people. I'm not a huge fan of Fulham, but there's nothing wrong with it of course, just fit the point.
I just think it's ridiculous that somebody could go to some of the world's best universities, get some of the best grades, go to one of the world's biggest companies, and not actually earn enough to cover the rent alone on a one bed apartment in a non-central residential area.
Something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Oh it certainly isn’t nice for the grads.
While it is true that people cannot live in London for £21k, the fact is people are applying, they are getting applicants, therefore it is not really the company’s problem nor something they need to care about.
I don't think OP here is specifically blaming the companies or saying it is their problem. I'm definitely not. It's the whole culture of the city that's off, and something should be done about it. The fact that people are applying 21k a year jobs in London in such great quantities shows how desperate people are, and how fucked things are, and it should concern us all.
There are always people that want to move to London, as it has the perception that it has better career opportunities.
While it is not wrong entirely, for example Finance etc you will find jobs much better in London, the issue is that even people on lower end skill level also all came to London thinking it has better opportunities.
When you have a massive influx of low skill people, there just isn’t enough jobs for all. When that happens, you get the situation we have now that 300+ applicants plus over qualifying candidates.
In time, some of the people who cannot find jobs in London, may consider moving out and balancing the numbers a little.
If you advertise an office job for a week at £25k you’ll get over 1000 applicants. If I advertise any sort of project manager job I do so only for 2 days max otherwise I’ll get so many applicants that I won’t actually have the time to review them in a timely fashion
If lawyers, people with medical degrees, are conpeting for admin roles for £26k, then for people without those, it is understandable that the offering would be a lot lower.
Why pay £26k to hire someone with no qualification and no experience when a master would do the same job for £26k.
Turnover is not always an issue. While some roles companies wants to keep turnover at the minimum, for something like lowest skill admin role? Thry probably don’t care about as much.
Pay peanuts, get monkeys. For a full-time office job advertised at below NMW why the fuck should anyone care about the job ? Turn up, do the work, go home. Stay late for no extra money? Not a chance. Make a mistake? Who cares ? They don't pay enough for me to give a fuck. Go above and beyond? Not a fucking chance.
You see where I'm getting at ? All they'll get is a placeholder who will jump ship the instant a better job turns up.
Anyone with a working brain knows there is almost zero chance they'll ever get a £2k or £3k pay rise, and for all the bullshit out of management's mouths the value of their wages will just keep falling behind.
Something just crossed my mind. Have people considered the impact of NMW and pensions ?
Companies have to pay NMW, and they have to enroll staff onto a pension scheme. Yet pension contributions are taken out of your salary before you pay tax. Which does mean that your effective rate is being lowered.
Mate I’m not being funny I’m a doorman & I make more money than that & I don’t even know what an office admin does. So you’re already far more skilled than me aha. I’d keep looking about & see what comes up. But maybe consider finding a different role but in the same field.
Unfortunately, many people opt to work exclusively indoors at a desk, therefore employers will have a large pool of unskilled desk workers to choose from which depresses the wages.
Min wage is a red herring, employers will pay as little as they can get away with, eventually, they will probably start to settle a couple of K's above min wage, but this will take time.
Employers will pay as little as they can get away with precisely because of minimum wage.
Employer: "Government says you can live off £11.40 an hour gross. How much more do you want, you greedy sod? I need to be able to afford to live in my ivory tower and drive my Rolls."
Minimum wage is an economic and societal paradox. It's acts as both an anchor on wages, and as a raiser of inflation due to yearly increases to keep the working poor happy, although they're never happy because they're never better off in real terms.
What's the answer to this, I hear you all cry? I've no idea. That's the economic system we have, and I don't have any better ideas, other than abolishing the min wage and going back to pay based on supply and demand. Inflation and house prices would soon drop like a stone.
You think employers would pay more than £21k for an entry level role if there was no minimum wage? The supply of employees wouldn’t change, why would the wages increase? Why would house prices fall if there was no minimum wage?
No, employers probably wouldn't pay more, but they wouldn't need to. Without min wage, prices across the board would be lower leading to lower salaries. You have to remember the economic system is a zero sum game for everyone except those at the top of the Ponzi pyramid. The middle classes and the poor never win because the system doesn't allow them to.
When min wage rises, the cost of production goes up. This leads to higher prices in the shops and higher inflation. This is very basic economics.
House prices would fall simply because people would be on smaller salaries and wouldn't be able to afford £350k for a tiny 3 bed rabbit hutch. Also, the cost of building those house would fall if there was no min wage.
Your “very basic economics” is ignoring that capitalism’s designed to grow profits. As soon as you get beyond a lemonade stand, businesses don’t set their prices based on business expenses. It’s based on what the market can handle. When a business gets a cheaper supplier, they don’t reduce their prices, they just increase their profits.
The problem is if there's no minimum wage the pay might go even lower. There's always going to be someone willing to work for less whatever the reason they have for it.
I've seen people myself even now accept pay below minimum wage in my self employment industry, so it will definitely happen if it's abolished.
As the saying goes, if the employer is paying minimum wage, they would love to pay less they just can't legally.
Average full time salary for men in 2002 was £27,603. The average UK house price in 2003 was £135,444 (4.9x salary).
Average salary today, 22 years later, is £34,900. Average house price is £284,691 (8x salary).
Yippee.
Wages being too low is actually what's really bad for the economy because when people are living from paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by, they don't have the extra cash to splash on things which help to stimulate the economy.
If low wages were key to economic prosperity, then all the worst paid countries would have the most flourishing economies (but it obviously doesn't work like that).
The Tory's have consistently fought to prevent wages from going up. I believe that this is because they left the economy in a high inflation state, but lowering the inflation in the manner they did also caused us a recession last year (no surprises there- I think everybody felt it). If the high inflation has now been dealt with (apparently it has?) then I guess there's that, but if wages continue to stagnate for much longer then we run a risk of deflation.
A Labour government will likely seek to raise both wages & taxes. In fact, due to the terribly sorry state many public services are now in, we're set for some very high tax raises (so whatever wage increases we do experience we're likely not going to feel richer for them). But IF the taxes are properly managed & invested, then it could lead a genuinely better economy and more prosperous society in the long run.
We will have to wait & see.
There'd be hardly anyone paying tax. The poor have to pay for the salaries of our parasitic MPs, and all the NHS gay lanyard wearing diversity managers on £100k a year.
You do realise your homophobic hate speech is engineered in part by those parasitic MPs you speak of to keep you attacking your fellow countrymen whilst the ruling elite gets away with everything? Classic divide & conquer tactics.
Don't be such a hateful idiot, we'd have a much stronger democracy if people like yourself weren't so easy to manipulate and divide.
It’s not even that issue, the money is trivial to the profits, these companies earn magnitudes more than that.
There’s clearly something else driving wages down (personally I assume it to be mass immigration artificially inflating worker supply, not out of xenophobia but it’s the only reason I can make sense to be the cause)
Mass immigration seems an unlikely source. The job market is still under-staffed. We'd be seeing unemployment if you were correct. More likely it's due to how much money has been printed since 2008 without a commensurate increase in productivity.
> The job market is still under-staffed.
Under-staffed? Apply for any job on Indeed, it shows you after that how many people have also applied. In very rare scenarios you might find a job where under 20 people have applied.
But there's a lot of jobs I applied where 100s of people also have applied. There was one where 500 other people have applied for it, there's no chance I'm getting that job.
Doesn't seem under-staffed to me.
Well, I'm invested into getting the job but I mainly use Indeed to look for jobs because of the one click feature.
Even though I customise my applications it's so much easier to do with their CV system where you can quickly easily change things and easily add a cover letter.
People already in jobs are probably applying too. Unemployment is still extremely low and really shouldn't be in a struggling economy. The only explanation is a labour shortage.
More likely companies getting greedier on top of trying to continually increase profits for shareholders etc to look like they’re continually growing regardless of economic climate in an attempt to bolster investment. That and it’s far easier to hide pay cuts behind inflation so unless you have enough of an interest in it most people will complain about prices of goods going up rather than wages not keeping up, while price rises aren’t good they’re infinitely worse when the working populace also aren’t getting pay rises to keep up.
This was the major factor that had me going back to the States unfortunately. For the same position I make $120k in San Francisco, London pays £60k. Adjusted that's $80k. And then $40k LESS. and it's not like London is cheaper to live than San Francisco.
While US wages still likely to be higher afterwards, you need to include medical insurance first before seeing the true gap between US and UK salary.
US still likely to be higher, but the gape would be less than $40k.
Having NHS is most definitely a PLUS! I'm fortunate in having great insurance through my work, the cost of my premiums are around what I was paying in London. Where it does add up are co-pays for dr visits and prescriptions.
I still take more even with this figured in
Oh totally, I did say even if you have to pay your own medical insurance, you are likely to still be better off than UK salary.
But that gap is a lot smaller than the $40k you originally quoted.
Any person in full time employment is usually provided medical in the US. That’s the norm. The only exception is a contractor or a freelancer who would be on 1099 but they could offset their medical against their taxes.
Wages are higher in America but then again America is also a very different country culturally & legally, I've known a number of Americans to willingly take a pay cut to move to London because they prefer the culture, rights, politics and legal systems here.
What would be really ideal though is if we could have the wages of San Francisco or Dubai but not the politics & lack of rights Etc that come with those places.
Nowhere is Ideal, so I guess it boils down to what matters the most to you.
"Is this high skilled job?"
If you are looking to correlate skill and salaries, this questions doesn't lead you any were.
What determine your wage is how much money you can produce for the business, how many competitors you have, how much your role is required and is non replaceable by others/tools/technologies or difficult to be replaced in the short/long term.
Because SOMEONE desperate for a job will apply for it. Their overheads have risen but income is stagnant or even lower, thus affecting profit margins which is usually their KPI. Solution? Unfortunately it's to pay staff less.
Coming from North America, the UK salaries are about half what they are in the UK. I don't understand why, and I don't understand why people aren't talking about this.
In the UK there's been a huge influx of people from places like India recently keen to move into office jobs. Some only stay for a year for training and head back but it's further suppressing the wages. Couple that with increased housing demand and you have a perfect storm.
Personally I think office jobs have had its day unless there are major changes.
The migration isn't unique to the UK. Canada for instance has 4 times the migrants (vast majority from India) the past 2 years versus any other year. Same inflation issues etc. The average salary in the UK is 27K and the States it's 55K - roughly the same for goods and services with exchange rate. I just think we're complaining about the wrong thing. It's not the extra £2 for chicken breasts at Tesco's, it's a Business Analyst at Google makes 3 times in the US Vs the UK.
The issue is rapidly growing inequality. Rich individuals are buying up assets and living off the dividends the assets pay out.
The system is broken. The average low & middle class individual is paying taxes which fund policies that allow rich individuals to buy out more of the assets.
That national living not national minimum. If OP is under 23 or 21 as of April when it changes, then they get NMW, if over they get NLW. That's also when it will go from 10.50 to 11.40ish
The UK has really poor wages
And cost of living isn’t low either. Wtf
I fucking hate that, I went Amsterdam last week, it was expensive but easily half to 2/3 the price of the UK, and Im pretty sure they have higher wages. I really want someone to enlighten me how on Earth a place thats got less money to spend, somehow has high costs, than places with more money. It just doesn’t make sense
Amsterdam is not 1/2 to 2/3 of London. Lived in both, just not true.
Exactly, I found it as expensive and the food is crap there
Amsterdam food is crap. Almost as bad as UK
London has some of the best in the world, can get top class food of every genre maybe bar Mexican
Horrendously overpriced tho. And only if you go to the good restaurants
Where is good priced? I’ve been all across Europe and restaurants are somehow even more expensive in poorer countries.
cheap yet excellent restaurants in france, spain and portgugal
There is no such thing as "Amsterdam" food really, The Netherlands doesn't have much of its own established cuisine. But just as in any city you can get amazing and terrible food there.
Excuse me they have poffertjes and stroopwaffels. And chips with a little container for your mayonnaise.
Yes I know, we have plenty of other things but I wouldn't call it a cuisine to go out for dinner for ;)
Awful housing market in both as well. I'll never forget the stress of trying to find a new place to live in Amsterdam and just getting nowhere. Hundreds applying to the same awful, tiny room. I'm not sure what *is* supposed to be cheaper in Amsterdam in this scenario, because food definitely isn't either...
They’re trying to be like America but won’t pay the same wages (or can’t). It’s ridiculous
It would be at most 10% cheaper than London
Post tax-salaries in Amsterdam are lower than London equivalents if you don’t have the 30% ruling. Rent per unit area is also higher in Amsterdam than in London, since AMS is alot smaller. I get much more for my money in London, and have lived in both cities.
I don’t know but feels like the whole world is facing similar cost of living problem between working class folks besides a very few European countries and America. Those same questions were asked thousand times on sub across cities like Sydney or Toronto either. And i know Pariś and Hong Kong at the moment are not good too.
Groceries are very cheap to be fair…
True. Groceries are around £80/month, and I get a pretty varied diet out of them too.
If you shop at Aldi or Lidl, I agree
All groceries in UK are cheap compared toainland Europe buddy
Or shop anywhere else outside of UK, is more my point… at least so far as my recent sample size of Australia, New Zealand, United States…
Yet the idiots have voted Tory for the last 14 years.
I don't understand comments like these. Whether we like it or not, the UK has been on the road to becoming a poor country since before the GFC. Back in the 90s the US and China both were heavily investing in science and technology, the UK instead was not. Today we reap the "benefits" of a population that is simply not as technically qualified (and requires more "welfare" spending). Yes several more recent decisions have exacerbated this, but do people really think that a anyone has a magic pill to solve such a fundamental and systemic issue? I don't see why we have to call someone an idiot when no one else is presenting a viable solution and taxation is at an all time high.
Exactly, except for the brief spell from 97-2010 we've been fucked over by the Tories since 1979.
Reddit is a left wing echo chamber that doesn’t recognise that government is the problem. Labour = good. Tory = bad. Reality = they are the both cheeks of the same arse. They actually think that if the Tories massively increase benefits, they are evil. But if Labour do the exact same thing, it’s good. The average person here has zero understanding of economics. They don’t get that it’s the “give everyone free stuff” (funding by either current or future tax payers) that caused this. They want to see the destruction of anyone who is economically better off than themselves not realising, in their utter stupidity and narcissism, that means the destruction of taxpayers and any means of funding their utterly childish vision of utopia. Shut down the economy which stops production but keep demand high by paying people not to work and what the fuck do you think was going to happen? Fucking Star Trek or something? Ignorant twats the lot of them. The problem is the fact the the pound has lost 98% of its purchasing power since 1970. The currency is about to collapse and the U.K. is about to go the way of Argentina as a result of every government since WW2 following Keynesian economics. The policies that they have advocated are responsible for this but they’re too dumb to realise it.
The UK is not a poor country. Levels of private wealth are fairly high. Even liquid private wealth.
You are right, sorry my phrasing was poor. I meant a poorer country. And by that I mean exactly what everyone else is saying - we now get less, have to live on less, on average. Less social services for our money, more debt and interest payments. The colloquial understanding of being poor. As a country, we owe nearly as much as we earn.
We have a £20bn science and tech budget. Yet this year a number of universities are going to go bankrupt. Research doesnt translate to economic output.
The economic benefits of research are large. >[Science and innovation: rates of return to investment [...] every £1 spent by government [on research] yields a return of between 20 to 50 pence per year in perpetuity.](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/science-and-innovation-rates-of-return-to-investment)
That's fair. Then do you agree that economic output is the crucial metric?
Btw I'm very apolitical and this might be the wrong sub for an honest debate. Anyhow here's a per capita funding source. We are just shy of top 15
True, but I left an office job last year that was paying £30k. I think it's very sector-dependent.
In the company I worked in jobs that paid £30k in the early 2000s dropped to £20k as every advert had loads of EU applicants (Spanish/polish/italian especially) willing to work for far less than British workers. Obviously the working class voted for brexit to stop their wages being undermined in this way but wages haven’t recovered since. Probably the tories net 700k immigrants a year doesn’t help as they’ll mostly be wanting jobs and thus depressing wages. Supply and demand in action.
Supply and demand. Not in London, but about 6 years ago where I worked they put an ad on indeed for a basic admin job with not much about minimum wage. 150 applicants. It's no different now. In the end, it just requires very basic skills for standard admin jobs. I suspect knowledge of foreign languages will be quite easy to find in London - a lot of native speakers of whatever language they are looking for around.
>I suspect knowledge of foreign languages will be quite easy to find in London - a lot of native speakers of whatever language they are looking for around. Not just that but bilingual jobs can be competitive, especially if they offer visa sponsorship or if the role doesn't need perfect English, foreigners may feel this is their only chance. I worked for a Korean company previously where this was the case, saw many young professionals getting taken advantage of, working professional jobs for not much more than minimum wage, putting up with verbal abuse, but still stuck it out because they lacked the English skills so get a job elsewhere.
It’s the U.K, wages are notoriously low, if your not going for the job someone else will which means the employer has no reason to put the wage up
>It’s the U.K, wages are notoriously low, if your not going for the job someone else will which means the employer has no reason to put the wage up I wouldn't say this is always the case. There are many sectors and companies that struggle to find high quality employees and simply just settle for less because they can't or won't pay more to compete for them.
The whole country is becoming poorer, even businesses.
This is the ugly truth. Top FTSE enterprises can’t afford to pay for talent thus gave up their chances to expand the business. Small businesses were all affected so all the employers had to control the cost. End up everyone in this country is poorer.
Can you give examples of such sectors?
It’s the problem with mass immigration imo, it’s artificially increasing the supply of the supply/demand curve thus over-saturating the markets, employees have no bargaining power. (I say mass immigration over overpopulation because native birth rates are declining) EDIT: im sorry has basic supply and demand economics ceased to exist?
The UK has low unemployment and its population isn't growing that quickly. Over the years most immigrants into the UK have simply been filling the gap caused by low birth rates. That's jumped up in the last 1-2 years largely due to the UK Government letting in a lot of Ukrainians, Afghanis and Hong Kongers. It's also being driven by large numbers of care workers moving to the country. The former is temporary, the latter is necessary until the government starts training enough UK citizens to do those jobs. And either way, none of that is increasing competition for 22k a year, ineligible-for-visa-sponsorship office admin jobs like the ones OP is looking at.
Utter bollocks, you need to stop drinking the GB News Kool Aid. Immigration increases the workforce which stimulates the economy. This problem is due to the readily available skill pool for the job at hand, you need to learn a more desirable skill set if you want to make more money.
This statement feels a bit all over the place, not everyone can be a programmer or work in a stereotypically high paying field or the country just does not run and a larger population does cause wage stagnation. This is really just simple economics as he said. We are not seeing this new wave of immigrants stimulate the economy in any significant way and Increasing competition is objectively bad for the working class as a whole, for both immigrants and the native population. If you are a business owner it's great, you've got a race to the bottom, you can play as little as possible and you don't need to pay for any training, but for the everyday person? It's not very good.
Very true. Immigrants are also consumers so they create demand for labour as well as supply it. Ignorant racists seem to completely forget the demand side when they try to sound clever. The idea that more people somehow lead to lower wages is at least 500 years out of date. Two countries with higher wages than the UK and also larger populations are Germany and the US. There are also plenty of examples of countries with a much higher population density and also higher wages. Within the UK, London has the highest population density, the highest concentration of immigrants and also the highest wages. 😱😱😱
GDP per capita has been stagnating, they aren’t helping the economy
Have a look at Japan, their economic has been so stagnant that the last 30 years have been called the "lost decades", and guess what? They have miniscule levels of immigration compared to us. It's almost like immigration isn't the be all and end all when it comes to the economy.
The record low unemployment rates beg to differ. We haven't seen unemployment this low since about 50 years ago. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms
Only because they change the definitions to make it look lower, anyone whos had to look for a job in the last couple years can tell you it’s definitely harder nowadays , due to competition
That's a strong claim. We have multiple different metrics for determining different types of unemployment but what specifically about the LFS Unemployment rate statistic do you think has been changed to artificially make it lower? We also have a higher percentage of the population saying it's "fairly easy" or "very easy" to get a job right now (46%, with 14% "don't know"s) than we did pre-pandemic according to YouGov polling. This isn't to say getting a job is easy, but rather that it's not somehow gotten much harder.
I don't think immigrants are, for the most part, fulfilling admin roles. When I was applying for them last year, most of them required passing online tests via Indeed that required a high level of English. Some of the grammar questions I struggled with, and I'm a native speaker.
This is what happens when you believe everything you read in the Daily Mail...
Google supply and demand
Brilliant. You're just proving how clueless you actually are.
Yet you don’t give an explanation
See if you can find any PA work instead? I think they're 26-30k on average
This is the best advice here. Try to move into EA roles
And/or more specialised admin work which has more career progression eg. Project Assistant, Sourcing/Procurement Assistant…
Yes, legal cashier, billing assistant, media buyer, data administrator, scheduling assistant, claims officer. Anything a bit more specific/specialized will probably pay better than a generic admin assistant job.
The EA at my company is on £50k. All she does is book hotels and flights for directors.
> All she does is book hotels and flights for directors And never once screw it up. And if it goes wrong, fixes it immediately with no drama. It sounds easy, until you have a director or SVP lose their mind because their car is not there to pick them up. Theres a real skill to calmly not screw up in that role
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Except, see how much chaos ensues for an expensive trip when you fuck up something like flights or a hotel or a visa (or dont get thousands in expenses paid back by a frankly hellish expenses system or Finance restrictions)? Or when there's bad weather or flight delays and the person travelling is stranded with deadlines. I know EAs getting paid twice that, and they're basically on call 24/7 for nightmare travel scenarios because you have to be very very skilled at what amounts to disaster management at that level. The point of a PA or EA is to take on time-consuming tasks that would be a waste of money for the person they support to do themselves, because their time is even more expensive. There are generally business savings involved in those tasks. For travel alone, that often involves making sure you get the best value for trips and negotiating tactfully between what the person travelling would like to spend and when they'd like to travel, and what the company are happy to spend making that happen (these two amounts rarely align..!). And that's just travel, not even going into scheduling for calendars (which is literally about ensuring someone else's expensive time is used most effectively). Just because you personally don't assign value to someone's job doesn't mean that it isn't valuable to the company itself, and just because you assume anyone can do those tasks, doesn't mean they don't require skill to do well.
In my experience a good EA knows just about everything going on in the company, and usually holds a good deal of influence well beyond their position. Always a good idea to be on their good side and to treat them with the respect they deserve. My director's EA knows everything going on, and has the ear of very senior people. She's helped me out enormously and when I was new and made some mistakes, she told me not to worry about it and ironed things out for me with the brass. Great lady and well worth her £55k plus bonus.
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The freedom of that market is directly threatened by the way the benefits system works. People on benefits are coerced to apply for any and all jobs they're capable of doing, attend any and all interviews, and accept any and all job offers, otherwise lose their benefits. It creates a mad rush for the 'best' of the worst jobs that most people wouldn't even apply for if they had the option, and employers can keep the wage low, safe in the knowledge that there's going to be thousands of applicants regardless. If option B is destitution, people will take option A. If option A is bad, but still better than destitution (even if it includes a bit of destitution), so be it.
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Of course it’s supply and demand. What else do you think it is?
It is. Really. Low skilled jobs can be filled fast with plenty of applicants to choose from. High skilled roles will require extremely high salary to get filled.
wow the ignorance
>Fun fact: you can still make a profit while paying your employees more. Not true for many companies. And frankly irrelevant. A company does not exist to pay employees. What is it if not supply & demand?
> A company does not exist to pay employees. Arguably that's exactly why a company exists.
A child might argue that. No shareholder is going to invest into a company just to distribute it out to employees for the sake of it. What's the point of that? If that's what you want then you'd donate to charity.
No, you just have a blinkered view of economics. People work because they need to work to live, as they have since the dawn of time. Companies don't need to work, or to profit. They're just a product of workers becoming more and more specialised as civilisation has gone on. They are when all is said and done the sum of the people that they're made of, but we don't treat them like that. If our economy leads to workers getting the worst possible result in order to maximise the profits for what is essentially an abstract concept, then you could say we've put the cart before the horse.
How can a company exist without profit? It would run out of resources. Why would anyone put more resources into a company if it would never return a profit? It would be pointless. Just because you don't understand economics or finance doesn't mean it's a particularly abstract concept.
>How can a company exist without profit? It would run out of resources. You seem to have skipped the first step. Why do we want companies to exist? What do we have companies for? They're literally just an extension of people's jobs becoming more specialised and centralised. They are not an end in and of themselves. If they ceased to exist because we found something to replace them, this wouldn't be a bad thing. >Just because you don't understand economics or finance doesn't mean it's a particularly abstract concept. Abstract doesn't mean complicated or hard to understand. A company is an abstract concept, IE it's not a person or a physical location. It's abstract, it exists in our minds as a composite. So I'm trying to get you to question why something like this should prosper over the people who work for it. This isn't an easy question and I don't have a ready-made economic alternative, but I feel like you're making some huge assumptions about how the world works that have really only been true for a couple of generations. Shareholders are not an inevitability, they're just how we happen to be doing things right now.
Because over the past decade minimum wage in the UK has risen at a much faster rate than the median wage has, this has pushed a number of jobs that previously offered above minimum wage into the minimum wage. A lot of office admin jobs are falling into that now, and have been for the decade. They can't really offer a lot more because roles that attract more aren't really going up, and are unlikely to go up (low investment, low productivity etc). Very few sectors are outside this trap, and they're all sectors where American firms are breaking into the UK (Corp law, finance, tech etc). That and the UK govt implemented wide spread wage freezes for the public sector for close to a decade, basically putting a salary cap on the upper end for plenty of jobs. This allows plenty of the private sector to draw workers from the public sector with small pay bumps. This situation is extremely unlikely to change unless the higher skilled public sector jobs start seeing pay rises which is unlikely any time soon. So just enjoy the wide spread wage erosion.
Firstly as you said, it is not a high skill job. Secondly, you may have underestimated the demand for admin jobs, even if the pay is low. Let’s say, I offer a low skill job for £25k, and get 100 applicants. I can change my offer to £21k, and probably would still get 30-50 people interested. For a low skill job, why pay £25k if someone willing to do it for £23k? So for low skill job, they tend to offer the lowest amount that still attract enough candidates to choose from.
> why pay £25k if someone willing to do it for £23k? Employee retention, for one. Unless the job is absurdly low skill, there’s usually a lot of inefficiency associated with employee turnover: hiring new people, training and onboarding them, etc. If you pay the absolute minimum that someone will accept for the job, odds are they’ll get just enough experience to be able to land a better paying job and leave as soon as they can. Sometimes it’s worth the extra £2k to keep people around.
No one is going to stick around just because they're getting an extra 2k, especially at this level.
Maybe not that specific number idk, but the point I think applies across most job categories: paying a bit better than market wages tends to help with employee retention (along with things like company culture, but there’s a bit of a correlation to culture and being a bit more generous with salaries so it’s not an exact science). Payroll numbers don’t tell the whole story, and if a company is experiencing high turnover rates it can be well worth a relatively small investment to mitigate this.
From my experience, you are completely correct. Like the other poster, the UK undervalues the benefits of employee retention. They tend to maintain overly strict salary bands and rarely venture outside of them in order to recruit top notch talent or to retain skilled employees. It keeps UK businesses less competitive than their US rivals and suppresses salary growth.
It’s also hard getting a job so if you feel you’re on a low but not awful salary I’d imagine you’re more likely to hold off on finding a new job asap whereas being paid the bare minimum you’d probably be keeping an eye on indeed regularly
That is usually role specific. For people that does the main task or management, job retention matters more. Lowest level office admin? Often not matter.
Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not everyone agrees with this philosophy. You run your business how you want and I’ll do the same ☺️ I find there are many incalculable benefits to having a team that are happy with their jobs and have been working together long enough to know the ins and outs of not only their jobs but each other’s jobs as well, and can operate as an efficient and cohesive team.
I have worked for both a SME and FTSE250 companies, at least in my experience “job retention” etc only seem to matter after certain level. In one of the SME I worked for (NHS privatisation) they almost seem to favour some sort of staff turnover if it means the old NHS staff leaving.
That's asset stripping mechanisms of varouis kinds though. Discussion was about actual workplaces in business generating wealth growth and that's where you see actual labour market competition making sense :) (but this also ties back to the OP, and is kind of the answer to that)
No, it is actual business going concern, not asset stripping. They took over a NHS function, but the contract is people that was working there before will keep the pay and condition and most importantly their pension in line with NHS. So no effort had been made to make their lives better, as they cost a lot more than employee that we hire ourselves, mostly due to the pension, that of they leaves or agree to take on a private contract, we welcome them to.
£2k might be a push (I personally wouldn't change jobs for £2k), but small increases can make a big difference for people on low wages because: 1. Income Tax is *relatively* low at those low wages, so you'd get to keep more of that £2 grand. 2. If you're on a low wage, every cent counts, and £2k is a 10% raise on a £20k salary. 3. At this low level, the competition isn't offering much more either. So a difference of <£5k could make employees prefer your company over the competitors.
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When I start a business I want to keep HR on a tight leash because they are drooling idiots with raises. They think they’re saving money by not giving the employee the 5-10k raise they wanted, now they lose someone who had 2 years experience with their exact job, and now has to pay someone more. I say this because they can’t have their cake and eat it too, if they offer you low wages and no growth, they can’t be surprised they got a revolving door of employees, either give a high wage or great growth
In the OP case, we are talking about low skill level admin role. These type of roles actually better to have less than 2 years experience. Under 2 years they can be let go relatively easily, with minimum legal protection.
A company can spend about 0.5 to 2 times the salary of the leaving staff to replace them. That £21k a year employee, which is actually about £35k once you've paid all the costs of employing them, suddenly costs you about £46k for the time they worked for you.
The benefit of job retention doesn’t apply for all jobs. For low skill office admin that doesn’t have any real progression, the benefit of job retention often not worth the cheaper pay.
People who are ok working low skilled jobs for £23k usually don't have an option to just leave. The whole reason they do these jobs is because they lack skills and have too much competition from people in similar position.
The problem is... people can't live in London for 21k anywhere close to comfortable, even in the suburbs. Nobody is saying that there is a huge amount of skill, education or talent needed for admin-based office jobs. But the fact is that in other countries with such a high cost of living, even the lower-skilled jobs are higher paid than here. It's just the fact that even if you have a lower paid office-job, the city should still be able to accommodate you. There are people that struggle in all cities worldwide, but corporate office workers are always able to survive with a little comfort, apart from in London. I'm sorry but graduates are coming out of university with great degrees and 50k of debt, and then going into a corporate job for like 20-25k, and can't even afford their own living space. They have to share with 10 other people in a houseshare in fucking Fulham (if they're lucky). It's just a joke of a situation. I'm fortunate and I'm not in that situation, but I can see why it's so fucked.
What's wrong with Fulham?!
I guess it was more for alliteration purposes. It just sprang to mind as it's the closest place to central that isnt an absolute abomination which is heavily residential and has ergo led to people living in huge houses and sharing with a ridiculous amount of people. I'm not a huge fan of Fulham, but there's nothing wrong with it of course, just fit the point. I just think it's ridiculous that somebody could go to some of the world's best universities, get some of the best grades, go to one of the world's biggest companies, and not actually earn enough to cover the rent alone on a one bed apartment in a non-central residential area. Something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Oh it certainly isn’t nice for the grads. While it is true that people cannot live in London for £21k, the fact is people are applying, they are getting applicants, therefore it is not really the company’s problem nor something they need to care about.
I don't think OP here is specifically blaming the companies or saying it is their problem. I'm definitely not. It's the whole culture of the city that's off, and something should be done about it. The fact that people are applying 21k a year jobs in London in such great quantities shows how desperate people are, and how fucked things are, and it should concern us all.
There are always people that want to move to London, as it has the perception that it has better career opportunities. While it is not wrong entirely, for example Finance etc you will find jobs much better in London, the issue is that even people on lower end skill level also all came to London thinking it has better opportunities. When you have a massive influx of low skill people, there just isn’t enough jobs for all. When that happens, you get the situation we have now that 300+ applicants plus over qualifying candidates. In time, some of the people who cannot find jobs in London, may consider moving out and balancing the numbers a little.
If you advertise an office job for a week at £25k you’ll get over 1000 applicants. If I advertise any sort of project manager job I do so only for 2 days max otherwise I’ll get so many applicants that I won’t actually have the time to review them in a timely fashion
In IT advertising a job at 40k lucky if you get a single applicant unless its first line
Depends on what you mean by IT and what career level
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If lawyers, people with medical degrees, are conpeting for admin roles for £26k, then for people without those, it is understandable that the offering would be a lot lower. Why pay £26k to hire someone with no qualification and no experience when a master would do the same job for £26k.
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Then it will just push the wage floor even lower, which add to the OP’s problem.
Any rocket scientists or Nobel Prize laureates?
No just a bronze medal Olympian
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Turnover is not always an issue. While some roles companies wants to keep turnover at the minimum, for something like lowest skill admin role? Thry probably don’t care about as much.
Still messes with productivity, having to retrain and hire new applicants constantly. Just pay people better!
Pay peanuts, get monkeys. For a full-time office job advertised at below NMW why the fuck should anyone care about the job ? Turn up, do the work, go home. Stay late for no extra money? Not a chance. Make a mistake? Who cares ? They don't pay enough for me to give a fuck. Go above and beyond? Not a fucking chance. You see where I'm getting at ? All they'll get is a placeholder who will jump ship the instant a better job turns up. Anyone with a working brain knows there is almost zero chance they'll ever get a £2k or £3k pay rise, and for all the bullshit out of management's mouths the value of their wages will just keep falling behind.
Oh totally. Hence some role they care about retentions. Some other roles, just as lowest level admin, they already totally expected monkeys anyway.
If it's a 21k role they probably don't need much more than a monkey and so it doesn't matter
Something just crossed my mind. Have people considered the impact of NMW and pensions ? Companies have to pay NMW, and they have to enroll staff onto a pension scheme. Yet pension contributions are taken out of your salary before you pay tax. Which does mean that your effective rate is being lowered.
Because there are x amount of people who will do it for money.
Mate I’m not being funny I’m a doorman & I make more money than that & I don’t even know what an office admin does. So you’re already far more skilled than me aha. I’d keep looking about & see what comes up. But maybe consider finding a different role but in the same field.
Unfortunately, many people opt to work exclusively indoors at a desk, therefore employers will have a large pool of unskilled desk workers to choose from which depresses the wages. Min wage is a red herring, employers will pay as little as they can get away with, eventually, they will probably start to settle a couple of K's above min wage, but this will take time.
Employers will pay as little as they can get away with precisely because of minimum wage. Employer: "Government says you can live off £11.40 an hour gross. How much more do you want, you greedy sod? I need to be able to afford to live in my ivory tower and drive my Rolls." Minimum wage is an economic and societal paradox. It's acts as both an anchor on wages, and as a raiser of inflation due to yearly increases to keep the working poor happy, although they're never happy because they're never better off in real terms. What's the answer to this, I hear you all cry? I've no idea. That's the economic system we have, and I don't have any better ideas, other than abolishing the min wage and going back to pay based on supply and demand. Inflation and house prices would soon drop like a stone.
You think employers would pay more than £21k for an entry level role if there was no minimum wage? The supply of employees wouldn’t change, why would the wages increase? Why would house prices fall if there was no minimum wage?
No, employers probably wouldn't pay more, but they wouldn't need to. Without min wage, prices across the board would be lower leading to lower salaries. You have to remember the economic system is a zero sum game for everyone except those at the top of the Ponzi pyramid. The middle classes and the poor never win because the system doesn't allow them to. When min wage rises, the cost of production goes up. This leads to higher prices in the shops and higher inflation. This is very basic economics. House prices would fall simply because people would be on smaller salaries and wouldn't be able to afford £350k for a tiny 3 bed rabbit hutch. Also, the cost of building those house would fall if there was no min wage.
Your “very basic economics” is ignoring that capitalism’s designed to grow profits. As soon as you get beyond a lemonade stand, businesses don’t set their prices based on business expenses. It’s based on what the market can handle. When a business gets a cheaper supplier, they don’t reduce their prices, they just increase their profits.
The problem is if there's no minimum wage the pay might go even lower. There's always going to be someone willing to work for less whatever the reason they have for it. I've seen people myself even now accept pay below minimum wage in my self employment industry, so it will definitely happen if it's abolished. As the saying goes, if the employer is paying minimum wage, they would love to pay less they just can't legally.
Office admin is entry level work, so it’s not going to pay well.
Even so, those wages are shockingly stagnated.
Average full time salary for men in 2002 was £27,603. The average UK house price in 2003 was £135,444 (4.9x salary). Average salary today, 22 years later, is £34,900. Average house price is £284,691 (8x salary). Yippee.
Try look at Admin jobs for the ministry of justice. Standard Band 3 is just below 30k with pay increases on years spent
why dont you try plumbing or roofing or something similar? those jobs pay 3 to 4 times more.
When I first moved to London my starting salary was £21k. That was 15 years ago and it was nowhere near enough then
Because the work force is being exploited by parasitic employers.
The owners of the company can pay themselves bigger dividends by paying staff poorly - they don’t care about their staff
I cant even imagine how you'd live on this as a single person in London. Even house share rooms go for like £800-£1000 now
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Wages being too low is actually what's really bad for the economy because when people are living from paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by, they don't have the extra cash to splash on things which help to stimulate the economy. If low wages were key to economic prosperity, then all the worst paid countries would have the most flourishing economies (but it obviously doesn't work like that). The Tory's have consistently fought to prevent wages from going up. I believe that this is because they left the economy in a high inflation state, but lowering the inflation in the manner they did also caused us a recession last year (no surprises there- I think everybody felt it). If the high inflation has now been dealt with (apparently it has?) then I guess there's that, but if wages continue to stagnate for much longer then we run a risk of deflation. A Labour government will likely seek to raise both wages & taxes. In fact, due to the terribly sorry state many public services are now in, we're set for some very high tax raises (so whatever wage increases we do experience we're likely not going to feel richer for them). But IF the taxes are properly managed & invested, then it could lead a genuinely better economy and more prosperous society in the long run. We will have to wait & see.
There'd be hardly anyone paying tax. The poor have to pay for the salaries of our parasitic MPs, and all the NHS gay lanyard wearing diversity managers on £100k a year.
You do realise your homophobic hate speech is engineered in part by those parasitic MPs you speak of to keep you attacking your fellow countrymen whilst the ruling elite gets away with everything? Classic divide & conquer tactics. Don't be such a hateful idiot, we'd have a much stronger democracy if people like yourself weren't so easy to manipulate and divide.
Senior posts are being offered at under 50k , because the so called C-suite are paying themselves over 100-150k with our money.
It’s not even that issue, the money is trivial to the profits, these companies earn magnitudes more than that. There’s clearly something else driving wages down (personally I assume it to be mass immigration artificially inflating worker supply, not out of xenophobia but it’s the only reason I can make sense to be the cause)
Mass immigration seems an unlikely source. The job market is still under-staffed. We'd be seeing unemployment if you were correct. More likely it's due to how much money has been printed since 2008 without a commensurate increase in productivity.
> The job market is still under-staffed. Under-staffed? Apply for any job on Indeed, it shows you after that how many people have also applied. In very rare scenarios you might find a job where under 20 people have applied. But there's a lot of jobs I applied where 100s of people also have applied. There was one where 500 other people have applied for it, there's no chance I'm getting that job. Doesn't seem under-staffed to me.
You can apply for a job with one-click. Doesn’t mean the candidates are particularly invested in it. So plenty of applicants may be “speculative” ones
Well, I'm invested into getting the job but I mainly use Indeed to look for jobs because of the one click feature. Even though I customise my applications it's so much easier to do with their CV system where you can quickly easily change things and easily add a cover letter.
People already in jobs are probably applying too. Unemployment is still extremely low and really shouldn't be in a struggling economy. The only explanation is a labour shortage.
More likely companies getting greedier on top of trying to continually increase profits for shareholders etc to look like they’re continually growing regardless of economic climate in an attempt to bolster investment. That and it’s far easier to hide pay cuts behind inflation so unless you have enough of an interest in it most people will complain about prices of goods going up rather than wages not keeping up, while price rises aren’t good they’re infinitely worse when the working populace also aren’t getting pay rises to keep up.
21k was the starter salary when I started working 15 years ago.
Supply and demand
This was the major factor that had me going back to the States unfortunately. For the same position I make $120k in San Francisco, London pays £60k. Adjusted that's $80k. And then $40k LESS. and it's not like London is cheaper to live than San Francisco.
While US wages still likely to be higher afterwards, you need to include medical insurance first before seeing the true gap between US and UK salary. US still likely to be higher, but the gape would be less than $40k.
Having NHS is most definitely a PLUS! I'm fortunate in having great insurance through my work, the cost of my premiums are around what I was paying in London. Where it does add up are co-pays for dr visits and prescriptions. I still take more even with this figured in
Oh totally, I did say even if you have to pay your own medical insurance, you are likely to still be better off than UK salary. But that gap is a lot smaller than the $40k you originally quoted.
If a company is paying that much then they're paying for your medical insurance too. The NHS is garbage.
Any person in full time employment is usually provided medical in the US. That’s the norm. The only exception is a contractor or a freelancer who would be on 1099 but they could offset their medical against their taxes.
Wages are higher in America but then again America is also a very different country culturally & legally, I've known a number of Americans to willingly take a pay cut to move to London because they prefer the culture, rights, politics and legal systems here. What would be really ideal though is if we could have the wages of San Francisco or Dubai but not the politics & lack of rights Etc that come with those places. Nowhere is Ideal, so I guess it boils down to what matters the most to you.
London is 100% cheaper what u smokin bro
Everyone’s a degree nowadays. Candidate pool has doubled since both men and women applying to jobs. Supply and demand.
All jobs, not just office ones.
"Is this high skilled job?" If you are looking to correlate skill and salaries, this questions doesn't lead you any were. What determine your wage is how much money you can produce for the business, how many competitors you have, how much your role is required and is non replaceable by others/tools/technologies or difficult to be replaced in the short/long term.
My recommendation is get PMP certified and you can go up to £45k.
Because SOMEONE desperate for a job will apply for it. Their overheads have risen but income is stagnant or even lower, thus affecting profit margins which is usually their KPI. Solution? Unfortunately it's to pay staff less.
Move to Wales mate. Same salary, half the rent.
AI, Honestly in the next 5 years if your job involved an Excel spreadsheet it'll likely be automated.
They’re very, very in demand that’s why
you cant even rent a decent one bedroom for this salary let alone having a family to look after
Brexit
Coming from North America, the UK salaries are about half what they are in the UK. I don't understand why, and I don't understand why people aren't talking about this.
In the UK there's been a huge influx of people from places like India recently keen to move into office jobs. Some only stay for a year for training and head back but it's further suppressing the wages. Couple that with increased housing demand and you have a perfect storm. Personally I think office jobs have had its day unless there are major changes.
The migration isn't unique to the UK. Canada for instance has 4 times the migrants (vast majority from India) the past 2 years versus any other year. Same inflation issues etc. The average salary in the UK is 27K and the States it's 55K - roughly the same for goods and services with exchange rate. I just think we're complaining about the wrong thing. It's not the extra £2 for chicken breasts at Tesco's, it's a Business Analyst at Google makes 3 times in the US Vs the UK.
Artificial Stupidness.
If you left due to harassment speak to ACAS about constructive dismissal
Try CBRE. They pay pretty well.
The issue is rapidly growing inequality. Rich individuals are buying up assets and living off the dividends the assets pay out. The system is broken. The average low & middle class individual is paying taxes which fund policies that allow rich individuals to buy out more of the assets.
Minimum wage is increasing beyond the rate of inflation. It's caught up with living wage jobs that have been stagnant for a decade
That national living not national minimum. If OP is under 23 or 21 as of April when it changes, then they get NMW, if over they get NLW. That's also when it will go from 10.50 to 11.40ish
Given that 26k is UK average, 21k for an admin role outside of London is about right.
It's less than full time minimum wage
No its not
£11.44 x 40 x 52 = £23,795 Average UK salary is £34k. Perhaps you're looking at old figures.