Ireland- Minimumwage Land

Yurt2

Lackadaisical wrote: »

I’d have thought the growth or the so called gig economy is far more of a problem than minimum wage. The number of people I know, and I would include myself in this, who are being expected to work as self employed contractors is getting worrying.

It’s all fine and well if it suits you, but when it doesn’t, it means having limited ability to plan ahead, difficulty getting access to credit and usually no pension provisions or sick pay.

Gig economy workers are often in far more precarious situations than anyone else in the country and when they try to get social welfare if it all goes wrong e.g. work dries up or they’re sick, they’re often faced with huge hurdles because of how PRSI works in Ireland.

They’re often some of the hardest working people in the country but they have some of the worst protections and more and more of this is happening.

I remember being at a conference in France for businesses and one of the positives about Ireland was our “hyper flexibility” which basically meant you could hire staff through agencies and drop them at will.

For all the talk further up the thread about Ireland doing whatever it is Europe says, it’s absolutely not true. We are usually dragged kicking and screaming into providing the bare minimum of workers rights, much like our neighbors in Britain who are a couple of degrees worse.

I've had the opportunity to work in both minimum wage jobs, and alongside some of the 'captains of industry' and the great and good of this fair country in my career.

I'll let you guess who I think had the better work ethic. Some people we nominally assign as 'the most productive' in our economic system, are little more than chancers who were skilled at climbing the social ladder, knew how to cut corners and had the correct patter to get themselves to the top of the greasy pole (and no little degree of ruthlessness). There are of course those that are there on merit and by dint of raw intelligence and skill, but they're less in number than you'd imagine.

Lackadaisical

In general though you’ll find the average person on low wages or in the unusable employment (gig economy) works very hard. They’re just rewarded very badly.

What annoys me about a lot of so called gig economy jobs is that they basically give you the risks of self employment without any of the benefits of ownership of your own business.

I also find working for a lot of Irish small and medium businesses that they are awful at paying contractors’ invoices. I don’t know how many times I’ve been waiting 60 and 90 days to get payment for invoices while some business continues to ask me to do more work. You end up having to keep resending reminders or generally having to repeatedly ask and beg to get prompt payment.

It’s worse when you’ve a situation like having to buy or rent equipment or consumables that aren’t paid for.

I have experienced the complete opposite with most continental clients. They pay within a few days and absolutely within 28 days.

I just find sometimes Ireland and also Britain are rife with nasty a somewhat more nasty business culture with lots of vultures.

Mr. teddywinkles

leonffrench wrote: »

I don't want them to work jobs that don't pay enough but it's necessary. It's a free market so people are free to get whatever jobs they are qualified to do. For some people, students or single people living at home for example, minimum wage is enough.

If it's not enough then you need to get a better paid job by upskilling or gaining experience.

We need minimum wage jobs for people to start off in to gain experience. People can be upwardly mobile if they put effort and hard work into study and/or working. Making excuses about the system being unfair gets you nowhere.

I'm not exactly spouting radical ideas here, this is the concept that western civilisation is built on.

What if everyone has skills or up skilling. The pool of people to choice from is higher so
wages deflate. Upskilling is not always the answer.

Auguste Comte

cgcsb wrote: »

eh, in DCC they sure have, they've been blocking housing for the poor for years.

In fareness I don't think SF are left wing or follow left wing principles or any principles really.

Raging centrist with no principles doing their best to Rob FF's breakfast.

leonffrench

Mr. teddywinkles wrote:

What if everyone has skills or up skilling. The pool of people to choice from is higher so wages deflate. Upskilling is not always the answer.

There is a constant cycle of workers entering and leaving the workforce. People are all at different skill levels at any given time, no different than it is now. This system in in place right now and we don't have the problem you mentioned.

Lackadaisical

Well the whole economy has also gone up the skill level scale to some degree too. You’re seeing higher concentration of high value added jobs, especially in the two largest cities. There’s a move away from Ireland just being a place to locate back office stuff and a lot more core business functions moving here and a decently growing range of Irish companies moving up that food chain too.

It’s a complex market though. Not everyone can upskill but we are financially wiping people out with crazy costs of living due to pathetically poor housing policy and other planning. It’s made worse by the fact our economy tends to grow in surges rather than steadily over long periods of time.

Reducing overheads like accommodation costs, commercial rents and insurance would actually drive down the lifestyle gap and improve the standards of living far more for those on lower income. It would also make more money available in the real economy being spent into businesses that employ a lot of people at all skill levels.

The biggest issue here is definitely housing and built environment infrastructure. Supply isn’t remotely meeting demand.

chrissb8

I hate the stupid rhetoric that your standard of living is what you can afford to eat. The OP talks about frozen burgers as being the bottom of the barrell stuff.

It is so easy to eat well for cheap. Buy in bulk, get a laptop/cookbook out and make some easy tasty meals. Freeze what you don't eat etc. etc.

I've been to friends/family well off and not so well off and have had great meals with both sets.

Lackadaisical

It’s actually not that easy to eat well on a budget here compared to many parts of Southern Europe in particular. I wouldn’t rate Ireland well in terms of access to cheap fruit and veg or meat and fish is often extremely expensive and people tend to keep buying a very narrow range and don’t know what to do with other varieties of seafood when it comes to cooking. It’s worse if you’re away from a big urban area or have limited access to a car. We are extremely suburban / quasi rural hinterland focused and that tends to reduce access to varied retail.

Also, like Britain, we’ve a lot of people with very limited ability to cook real meals. I’m often shocked at what I see in shopping trollies. Most are good but you’ll see the odd one loaded with garbage food.

I lived with ppl who thought cooking involved following the instructions on an M&S ready meal.

A lot more simply cook meat and two veg. I had a housemate who just bought either steak or chops and ate them with potatoes and baked beans or peas every day!

I wouldn’t call them stupid but I think these islands have historically had a hand to mouth working class food culture and little variety. There’s a very utilitarian approach to a lot of home cooking. The availability of fresh produce is improved enormously but we need to accept we have a historical issue with food culture. The growth in disposable incomes and convenience has tended to result in some people just buying lots of rich processed food.

hatrickpatrick

cgcsb wrote: »

While I agree with most of what you say, the cost of groceries in Ireland isn't expensive at all. Meats in Ireland are especially cheap. For example most of Austria you can't even buy beef in most supermarkets and where it exists, it costs a bomb. Similar in Germany, Holland etc. and let's not even look at further North. The UK has cheaper food, but....they're filthy.

This just came out today:

https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-food-drink-4692116-Jun2019/

IRELAND IS AMONG the most expensive countries in the EU when it comes to buying food and drink according to new data from Eurostat.
The figures from the EU’s statistical office shows that Ireland comes joint-fourth when it comes to the price of food and non-alcoholic beverages, and in second place in terms of the most expensive alcoholic beverages.
Food baskets here cost 20% more than the EU average, with Denmark the priciest in Europe.
The cost of bread and cereals in Ireland for example is 119% of the EU average, with the cost of milk, cheese and eggs 121% of the average.
Alcohol, meanwhile, is 177% of the average, while the cost of tobacco here is twice the EU average.
The cost of alcohol here is only slightly less expensive than Finland, where drink costs the most in the EU.

So you may be right when it comes to some specific examples, but these stats certainly ring true in my experience - whenever I go abroad to other European countries on any kind of self-serving trip, I'm always amazed at how cheaply I can buy the same basic stuff for the fridge and food cupboard compared with here. Once you factor in going out to do anything leisure related - restaurants, pubs, cinemas, bowling alleys, whatever - it's astronomically cheaper, it's hard to believe it's the same continent and that you're paying in Euros. Spain had a similar recession to ours which caused similar deflation in wages etc, but you can buy a can of beer for 40c in a supermarket and you can get a six pack of yoghurt for around 20c (where the same one costs at least €1 here, with regard to either the can or the yoghurt). I haven't been to Italy in a long time but my mum has, and she reports a similar exceptional difference in price between groceries there and groceries here. I'm specifically remembering being gobsmacked at the price of a beer and a six pack of yoghurt, so perhaps alcohol and dairy are particularly cheap in other countries compared to us? I definitely remember how much "going out to do something" was cheaper in pretty much every other European country I've been to though.

Most of these countries have a lower minimum wage than us, but when you look at their minimum wages and the cost of groceries in a ratio context, people on the minimum wage have considerably more purchasing power in those countries than people in Ireland, and that's the nub of the problem. Something needs to be done to drive the cost of commodities down in this country. Tackling commercial rents, taking councils to task for wasting ratepayers' money and dealing with liability law would all be great places to start, but none of these things is being looked at, and the government has a "It's the free market, none of our business *shrug*" attitude to dealing with this.

Lackadaisical

The comparison with alcohol and tobacco is somewhat irrelevant, as the high prices are there because of high tax designed to curb consumption. That’s a deliberate health policy.

However, we are very seriously expensive for everything else too and none of that is for policy reasons. We generally have less competition due to being a somewhat isolated economy on an island but we never seem to get the bang for buck that the rest of Europe gets, despite being in the single market and using the Euro.

You can see the impact though that Aldi and Lidl made with a more continental model.

AndrewJRenko

Pkiernan wrote: »

By improving themselves and getting good jobs perhaps?

Why do people think minimum wage jobs should be all they aspire to?

This doesn't solve the issue at all at a societal level. Even if the individual does improve themselves and rise above a minimum wage job, the minimum wage job remains - someone remains in the minimum wage job, probably the person minding our young children or our elderly parents.


And they need to have some kind of half-decent life in society on that minimum wage. Or do we want the 'American dream' of two or three jobs to survive, and working as a 'greeter' in WalMart into your 70s to pay for food.

chrissb8 wrote: »

I hate the stupid rhetoric that your standard of living is what you can afford to eat. The OP talks about frozen burgers as being the bottom of the barrell stuff.

It is so easy to eat well for cheap. Buy in bulk, get a laptop/cookbook out and make some easy tasty meals. Freeze what you don't eat etc. etc.

So you need a laptop and broadband then? Another barrier...