An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)

Subject: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: The Shambles
Date: 01 Apr 99 - 10:22 AM

I am very pleased to announce that as from 1st of April 1999, The UK has a minimum wage!!!!

I don't think the date is significant?

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Alice
Date: 01 Apr 99 - 11:58 AM

And the wage is.....???

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: The Shambles
Date: 01 Apr 99 - 12:21 PM

Not very significant, I'm afraid, if you have to try to live on it, but it is a start.

I was always amazed by the salary levels of all the so called experts, on what trouble and doom this modest proposal would bring. The experts to me were the ones that were actually trying to live on these low pay levels, but they didn't seem to get asked!

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: katlaughing
Date: 01 Apr 99 - 12:52 PM

Shambles, and so it is is in the States, too!

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: PeteFletcher
Date: 01 Apr 99 - 01:00 PM

No not very much, £3.60 per hour or £3.00 if under 21.

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: northfolk/al cholger
Date: 01 Apr 99 - 07:18 PM

I hope at some point in the very near future I can say that my LABOR PARTY is better than your LABOUR PARTY, it is certainly ironic that as a matter of national policy, in the most advanced consumer economies in the world, that it would be acceptable to define the hourly wage under the poverty level...

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Susan A-R
Date: 01 Apr 99 - 09:23 PM

Vermont is doing some interesting "Liveable Wage" education stuff. If anyone is interested, I could probably figure out ways to link you to them. They go into churches, city councils, etc. and do presentations that really make people think about what it's like to live on minimum wage. They've gotten some local governments to issue resolutions (non-binding, alass) in support of the concept, but if the support builds, even on a token level, it's gotta creep up eventually.

It seems to me that they suggest $8.00 an hour as liveable here in Vermont. Pleased to say that even though I run a one-year-old busines, that's what I pay the folks who prep and clean with me If I can do it, so can they, b'god!

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: hank
Date: 02 Apr 99 - 08:34 AM

I'm always amused by people who think it is not possibal to live on minimun wage. I know people who while working minimun wage put themselves through school, and fed their wife/kid. I'm thinking of one person in particualar who didn't get goverment subsities (too proud) and didn't belive in women working outside the home. He did it, so I know it is possibal. There are many things that most of us consider needs that are wants, TV, mudcat, music (other then a cheep raido, or insterments you got as a gift), cars, restaruants, etc. Note that I'm not suggesting that I would want to live on mininmun wage, it isn't easy. Doable is very different from something you want to do. BTW, most people with family are not making minimun wage anyway, (remember to count tips) there are jobs out there for the unskilled laborer that pay 8-12 an hour, if you are not too proud to clean a floor.

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: steve in ottawa
Date: 02 Apr 99 - 12:20 PM

There are jobs out there that pay US$8-12 an hour if you are not too proud to clean a floor? Hahahahaha. That's a union's doing and the job will have *plenty* of applicants. I've talked to plenty of non-unionized cleaners who make less than US$4.50 an hour AND aren't even given 35 hours a week because tenants in their buildings have moved elsewhere.

On the lighter side of cleaning, I once heard an interview with the person in charge of maintaining Queen Elizabeth's art collection. The main duty of the people she hired was to carefully vacuum away the dust on paintings (without actually touching them, I suspect), and their most important qualification? A university degree in Art History.

It's always puzzling to me that there's always someone who happily cites an accomplishment of someone with extremely good self-discipline as something that should be expected of the least able members of the general populace.

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Rick Fielding
Date: 02 Apr 99 - 12:54 PM

Right on Steve. I've also met a few guys who don't want "their" women working outside the home. Fortunately they think I'm a commie liberal creep and want nothing to do with me!

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: catspaw49
Date: 02 Apr 99 - 01:28 PM

Being a househusband you KNOW what they think of me...but I'm real popular with women who envy Karen. If they knew what she had to put up with.........

catspaw

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: katlaughing
Date: 02 Apr 99 - 03:38 PM

Hank,

It depends on where you live. With the idiot legislature in Wyoming and the people who keep voting them in, there are NO floor cleaning jobs or others which pay anything above min. wage, here.

Waitresses and Waiters make something like 1.50-2.00 U.S. dollars per hour and have to rely on tips to make enough to barely subsist. I know, I've been there with two kids. And, a lot of women have to swallow their pride if they want to feed their children.

When I was first divorced, my oldest two were 1 yr and 3yrs old. I went to college for a year, got certified as an EMT and when I went to work got min. wage, which then was about 2 something per hour. Welfare paid for my schooling and after I went to work, for my babysitter, for the first three months, only. I was very grateful for that, as their father didn't then, and never did, pay any court ordered child support. Things may be different today with aggresive policies towards non-paying parents, but I still know many single mothers who would not be able to get anywhere without some help. No, they shouldn't be on it forever, but they must be helped in order to climb the rungs of society's economic ladder and learn to make a living for themselves.

It has always seemed so ironic to me that the conservative preach about mothers staying at home and raising their children, but let a single mother try that with aid form the government and she gets called all kinds of names, including lazy.

That is the only time I ever was on welfare, but I am very grateful it was available to me and I know it helped me to be a better mother to my kids.

katlaughing

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: AlistairUK
Date: 05 Apr 99 - 06:18 AM

who is this Hank?... Man, we have the right to have what we want, as long as we work for it. This is shit man you have really really offended me. I used to hear the ultra-conservative gobshites say these kinds of things. I know people who work 90-100 hours a week for minimum and their lives are crap so don't come in with this "doable"everyman it ain't the thing (unless you are an unmarried student who...let's face it...doesn't really need THAT! much. Minimum wage is a swindle to make the working classes think they're getting a deal, but it is still a blindsider to keep the plebs in line...and you my friend Hank were suckered.

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Pete M
Date: 05 Apr 99 - 09:15 PM

Alistair, well and colourfully put. Here in NZ we also have a "minimum wage" but we don't have a "poverty line" Then no one can be under it! Hank, I don't know how much contact you have had with, or experienced, low income, but believe me there are two threads here. First those who espouse the so called new right monetarist theories have done an excellent job in most Western democracies of convincing everyone, including the undeserving poor themselves, that they are idle and worthless, and the only way of making them get a job is to make conditions on the dole etc untenable. Exactly as noted by William Booth in the 1860's. I would hope that we had progressed somewhat as a society in the last 100 years, but it seems not.

Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally there is a wide misconception that low cost equates to "efficiency", and that only services which are counted towards GNP actually contribute to society. Now neither of these ideas stand up to the most superficial of analysis, but they are the accepted gospel and must be worshiped.

I agree that 'wants' are not 'needs', but the most fundamental need of humans beyond food and shelter is self respect and dignity, and the basic 'want' of everyone is for your children to have the opportunities you did not. If you can't fulfil these because you can't get a job, or have one where the wages are so low that you have to choose between being undernourished yourself or letting your children go hungry, it is a condemnation of society not the individual.

Pete M

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Night Owl
Date: 06 Apr 99 - 01:11 AM

Hey...kat...thanks for the post! I believe you speak eloquently for millions of single parents who are expected to pull themselves up "by the bootstraps" when they have no boots. Dignity?, self-respect? If you are still hanging on to it before setting foot into the "Welfare" system,.... begging for help with hat in hand often destroys it.....Congratulations, katlaughing, on beating it! Must have something to do with wearing purple!

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: hank
Date: 06 Apr 99 - 09:19 AM

Like I said above, I know a man who working for minimun wage supported is family. I wouldn't pretend that he had an easy time of it, he was skimping and pinching everywhere, but he did it until he decided enough of this, quit school and moved to a different city with better jobs. His life while working minimun wage was hard. I wouldn't call it crap though because he had his family, and he had is priorities right. Yes he ate a lot of ramon and macoroni, but he was able to keep a healthy diet overall, a roof over his head (one bedroom apt, but it was a roof) and clothes on his back. For entertainment he discoverd all the parks around town.

I also know a man making a 6 figgure salery, nearly bankrupt due to dept, and worried about his next meal and if he can make the payment on his house.

The latter is unhappy with his life, and the former was happy. The former worked much harder at a job that we look down on. The latter works a job we all think is great.

It all comes down to money not buying happiness. The life the second man I described is crap, and it is by his own choices. The life of the first never was, even though if you look at the wrong things it was.

Please be careful in reading what I write. Many people assumed that I'm against all welfare, which is not true. I don't have a problem helping people like Kat for a couple years while they get back on their feet. I'm not against helping the people who mentially (or physically) are unable to work, or unable to work more then a few hours. I'm am however saying that you can live on what you have, or not live on what you have, and it has nothing to do with how much money you make.

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Bert
Date: 06 Apr 99 - 09:35 AM

You know Hank it's funny, reading your messages, I think we all pretty much want the same thing but just have different ways of putting it. You need some sort of balance between freedom and control. At times it's difficult to know where to draw the line.

I remember the late Ted Hill (president of the Boilermakers Society in England) saying that the problem with a minimum wage is that employers tend to use it as a MAXIMIM wage. It becomes the norm for most unskilled jobs.

There is also the problem of enforcement. How many people out there are working below the minimum wage? The trick that employers use is piece work. There must be thousands of women out there working sewing machines who get paid by the garment and who are making less than mimimum wage.

Another trick is the one they play on part time teachers. Pay then by the contact hour. If you are a part time teacher you usually have to prepare your own lesson plans, and what with preparation, grading, preparing tests and so on you find yourself spending three hour at home preparing for each hour of class. And if you divide a technical college teacher's salary by four you can often come down lower than minimum wage.

Bert.

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: AlistairUK
Date: 06 Apr 99 - 11:30 AM

Money doesn't buy happiness no. That is true. Your friend was lucky, but what about those who are considered too old for a decent job( by too old I mean 40 and above), a lot come from low income jobs in the first place and are considered the first in the firing line when "downsizing" or "prioritizing labour", or whatever metaphor the suits are using nowadays, comes into play. Why should a person of that age have to work for a pittance? I'm sorry but I left the UK 6 years ago because I had been made redundant and I couldn't get a decent job, and I've got a damned university degree (which for everybodys information took along time to flush away after I had used it for the only purpose it served)and I was only 27, so minimum wage and dignity do not go hand in hand. Minimum wage is a shackle to keep the rest of us in line.

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: John Galt
Date: 06 Apr 99 - 12:12 PM

The politicians establish a minimum wage and then tax it! If politicians really wanted to help they would not tax wages of .......say...=< $10,000 @ year. Now that would create more actual income for the minimum wage earner rather than a larger tax base.

Just one mans opinion......

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Bert
Date: 06 Apr 99 - 02:20 PM

John G. Of course, the only reason politicians allow any of us to earn a wage is so that they can grab some of it.

Alistair, I know what you mean about working in the UK. I had a similar experience. I was offered a job as a senior designer for British Rope in Sevenoaks designing overhead cableways and ski lifts and things. The local dairy offered me more money and a shorter working week for delivering milk. I vowed never to work in the UK again.

Bert.

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Willie-O
Date: 06 Apr 99 - 02:37 PM

I'm taking a break here from doing "my taxes"--actually I don't make enough money to pay taxes (as a self-employed Canadian I have to contribute to the Canada Pension Plan though), but I have to file so my better half gets her refund...

The real truth is there is no accurate generalization on what it's possible to live on. It depends where you are, the size of your family, what your housing circumstances are and so on, what your special needs are, and what you have to fall back on. Money won't make you happy, Hank, but not having it when your kids want to go to camp hurts.

Bill

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: The Shambles
Date: 06 Apr 99 - 03:07 PM

On the subject of money not buying you happiness, which I think it won't, but it would be nice to be able to speak from a position of authority.

I would like to quote the wise words of one Burt Reynolds a thespian of some note, I believe, who had a somewhat roller-coaster ride of good and bad fortune. He said.

I have been rich and miserable and I have been poor and miserable and I would rather be rich and miserable

Subject: RE: An announcement (NOT APRIL FOOL JOKE)
From: Steve Parkes
Date: 07 Apr 99 - 03:46 AM

I don't think that "more money" equates to "more misery". That hasn't been my experience. I'm not rolling in it by any means, and I'm working short-time contracts at the moment, so my work isn't all that secure. But I've known days, a long time ago, when I've had to chose between buying food and buying cigarettes (guess which I used to choose? Give it up, like I did!). Not having to worry where your next meal is coming from can cheer you up no end, and being able to choose between the better cuts of meat, or whatever you eat, can be a tonic, not just a luxury. It's true you see things a lot differently when you've got kids, too. ('Course, by then you're nuch less well off, financially!).

Steve