by tonyeh » Fri Jul 24, 2009 10:14 am
That's really an argument for increasing general wages Karhaz. I assume your brother isn't an investment banker or something as he wouldn't find things so hard. The likes of those earners aren't touched by even the remotest sense of poverty anyway. But in Britain and Ireland we are in serious danger of going down the route of creating an "American" working poor situation.
I think social welfare payments should be good enough to allow those people unfortunate enough to find themselves on the dole to be able to live a decent enough life. But wages to low earners should be incentivised enough to show that working to get that wage is the sensible option. In addition, people who work minimum wage jobs usually work in the crapest of conditions too and they work bloody hard by and large. Certainly, far harder than any job I've ever worked in. But they seem continually treated as expenable numbers.
In Ireland there dole is 204 Euro a week. That seems generous at first sight, but the fact is that the cost of living over here was at ridiculous levels for a long, long time and even though the cost of some items may have come down, it's still a very expensive place to live. Yet people are still arguing for cutting the dole. Some are even arguing of lowering the minimum wage, for god's sake!
They argue that cutting these areas will lessen the burden on our borrowing needs and may have some truth to it, but surely there are other ways to manage that. They also argue that it will help employers create jobs. But I think that's crap.
The one thing that it WILL actually do is simply make life harder alreay in a difficult situation.