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In the UK, wages and salaries are notoriously low, to the point where getting a uni degree is a waste of time for most people because outside of specific professions you earn literally the same amount as minimum wage. Im a lot of cases the salary allows employers to pay less because it's considered different to a wage.
Min. Wage rose recently from like £10.56 per hour to £12.71 an hour [$14.27 and $17.18 respectively]
So a short while ago, average wage was around £11/hr and average salary would be maybe £22,000-25,000 a year ($29,739.82-$33,788).
Now it would be maybe 13£, not sure what average salary is but probably the same.
In America this would be considered a disgustingly low salary. So why so low?
The reason our salaries are this low is not just because of funding the NHS, but because we have a huge portion of our population unemployed and thus needing welfare support, which comes straight out of the money businesses have to pay people with. And some other reasons - for instance the government spends a huge amount on processing asylum and immigration claims (of which there's an extraordinary amount given the size of the country). It's not anti immigration to to say this - it's just very very poorly thought out how much money is dedicated to the legal fees and bureaucratic fees of holding immigrants and refugees in one place and not letting them further into the country.There is 1 case of an entire town (Dudley, west midlands) taken over by organised crime. Entire high streets of some places are just money laundering fronts, which does sap some money out of the economy, with almost nothing spent there eventually ending up in tax revenue. But also those shops would be empty otherwise.
Britain has the most expensive electricity in the world, with governments continuously investing huge amounts of money intk closing down existing power stations (coal, gas et cet) to open up wind power and solar power. I don't really have a problem with this but they did go heavy on it and nuclear would have been better; it's undeniabke that this had massive effects on the overhead costs for everyone.
The government also expends a huge amount of money to protect/dignify the lives of criminals. Whereas america woild execute someone who raped and killed 5 childen, the uk would instead give them a new identity and a free house after 5 years in prison, and thsn every time someone finds out that they live next door to this infamous criminal, the uk buys them a new house and a new identity and moves them to another part of the country.
Because of the extent of organised crime in this country, they also, naturally, have to do this for the copious number of adult and child victims, moving families of people to different parts of the country. To save costs they have decided to use one specific town to dump them all in (won't name it here) which also costs huge amounts of money. Because like criminals, they need new identities, new homes, new jobs and relocation costs
Because of t r a d i t i o n we do stupid stuff like pay for our politicians to get drunk at work - yes, taxpayers pay for unlimited free drinks for members of parliament, naintaining three aeperate very snazzy bars inside the building. This isn't much compared to the other things i listed, but it probably draws the wrong crowd to political power, wouldn't you say?
Ths UK economy is so ridicukously micromanaged thst you're basically not getting mkney unless the government has decided thst yes, you personally, deserve a job or deserve benefits. If they wanted to blacklist you from work it woild be very easy to do so and they have genuinely done this to people.
Labour is fixing the economy though, and may be the only party that actually understands how to untangle the web that the tory party wove. They're not even my favourite party so just know this isn't political bias.
Wages aren't low in the UK, the cost of living is high.
Source: in Vietnam at the moment, lots of people make about $400/month
I mean I'm always hearing that they're relatively low compared to all economies of similar scale. Vietnam isn't that fair of a comparison
Wages in the uk are low relative to the US, at least in my current company, and train tickets into London for those working in the office are ridiculous
Yeah, that's the sort of metric used by those who do not want a reduction in the cost of living ... by putting the emphasis on wages it implies that people should 'work harder' or get 'better jobs'. That it's their fault, not that of people who control the cost of rent, transportation, etc
It's pretty unrealistic to expect cost of living to come down in a lot of areas - house prices can come down, sure (they'll fight their hardest not to reduce them though) but we already pay less for food than we really should do because farms are supported by the government and supermarkets bully farmers into lower prices.
In the future we're not going to have petrol cars (or if we do, it will only get more expensive) and this country is going to be more and more dependent on green energy until the nuclear plants are finished, which must be about 20-23 years away still.
Gas will go up or stay relatively the same since the people of Britain block new fracking projects (fair enough?)
We've also been getting discounts on anything imported, historically, because of the EU and other trade deals which are fizzling out.
So yeah overall I don't think cost of living is ever going to come down. Even if there was a reorganisation of the county to a more effective form of communism, we'd still have very expensive energy and be very reliant on imports.
There's no bias in this, it's cause and effect.
I hate to tell you, but minimum wage in the US will get you about $15k a year. Median wages are higher, but not high enough to actually be livable.
Where are you getting your news? Wherever it is you should stop, you're being fed (and spreading) misinformation.
About 12-14th place worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings?itemId=105
This is untrue. Minimum wage for salaried workers is calculated by average hours worked per pay period, if after dividing your pay by your average hours you are making less than minimum wage and your employer doesn't fix this you should report them immediately.
This obviously doesn't make sense on the surface since NHS is paid for through taxes and not salary deductions so you seem to be making a tax argument instead (?), but regardless while per capita spending on health services in the UK is high compared to some other countries, it is far from the highest.
At ~4.2% it's middling by most measures, but I'd definitely prefer lower. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/unemployment-by-country
I don't even know how to respond to that. You are aware that this is handled by the government and not private business, right? Is this just another roundabout way to complain about being taxed?
Are you aware that support for refugees in the UK comes out of the aid budget which has been reduced from 0.7% of gross national income in 2021 to 0.5%, and further decreased to 0.3% by 2027? Less of your taxes are being spent on this category now.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9663/
Regardless, number of refugees is high but not extraordinarily so for the region. Speculation, but that's likely due to English being the de-facto lingua franca for international communication so asylum seekers are more likely to speak the local language.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.ASYS.EA?contextual=region&end=2024&locations=GB&start=2000
The issue here is mismanagement more than number of refugees, the UK government reportedly managed to spend $26,000 per person compared to most countries spend under $10,000. As mentioned above though, this is from the aid budget which has already been reduced, this mismanagement prevents foreign aid but does not decrease your salary.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/costs-hosting-refugees-oecd-countries-and-why-uk-outlier
Barely two paragraphs in and this is already too long, if you want the rest of your comment to be taken remotely seriously you should at least add some sources.