Minimum Wage

People are reluctant to do part time work for more than 16 hours because they'd be worse off financially. Instead of whinging that you can't take full advantage of cheap impoverished labour, why not pay a decent wage or offer full time hours, you contemptible shits.

Let's take "youngsters".

Minimum wage for a 16 year old is £3.68 per hour.
Income Support (currently, it's getting cut folks!) for a single 16-24 year old is £56.80.

A 16 hour week earns them a whopping £115.68 a week including income support.

A 20 hour week earns them £73.60, because they lose the income support.

Minimum wage for an 18-20 year old is £4.98 per hour.

A 16 hour week earns them £136.48 including income support.

A 20 hour week earns them £99.60 per week, losing income support.

Minimum wage for 21 and over is £6.19 per hour.

A 16 hour week earns them £155.84 including income support.

A 20 hour week earns them £123.80.

To put it another way, as a 16 year old you need to find a job offering full time hours to just about break even, but wait! Up until last year, that would have put them over the personal allowance threshold for income tax so they would ideally be looking for 40 hours a week at least, to break even. On less than 8 grand a year.

If you're a 16 year old looking for work, you don't have any qualifications beyond GCSEs, so good luck getting away from menial labour/minimum wage jobs. This doesn't even cover the minimum wage for an apprenticeship for under 19 year olds, which is £2.65 per hour.

Let's say you're 21 with an a-level or 2 but haven't bothered with university. Prospects still aren't great, especially in towns like Merthyr Tydfil, so expect to earn twelve grand a year before tax, with a new shiny personal allowance of £9440, so kiss goodbye to 20% of the £2630 you're paying tax on, minus about £520 in National Insurance, leaving you on 11k a year. Subtract costs of travelling to work etc from that, as well as paying for your prescriptions.

Say that same 21 year old works 16 hours part time and claims income support. They'd earn £8,103 per year, net. If you're like me and have enough regular prescriptions that a prepay card makes sense, subtract £120 from full time hours mister 11 grand a year up there and he's down to £10,880 per year. So someone tell me why a wage slave should be willing to work more than twice the hours for only £2,777 a year more.

Anyone? Don't give me any of that "pride" bullshit, because there's no pride in earning less than half the national average income.

To connect the dots for anyone that doesn't get it yet, not a single number I've posted above can be described as a living wage with a straight face.

Yeah, what a bunch of scrounging, sponging fuckers, eh? It's little wonder there's close to a million unemployed 16-24 year olds when this is their alternative.

This is the effect of Thatcher gutting all of the industries and apprenticeships. They say apprenticeships are reinstated, but they're a fucking joke, with most employers using them as a loophole to pay <19 year olds an absolute pittance.

With 1 million unemployed and rising among the 16-24 year old demographic, Thatcher's policy of "unemployment creates competition for jobs and drives wages down" couldn't be more true, with no one having any incentive to offer higher than minimum wage to the people that need it the most. Then people wonder why people on benefits are angry and "can't be arsed". It's because there's no fucking point.