Anyone else notice it just seems like salaries havent really adjusted to the crazy inflation we’ve seen over the last 5 years? Im seeing skilled office jobs that need a degree going for basically £5k above full time minimum wage which just seems nuts.
Why do companies act like £30k is still a good salary?
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Because it would involve them paying more?
Board members need their bonuses and pay rises for God sake.
Because they would pay you less if they could
They’ll notice that their energy costs have doubled, their grocery shopping is through the roof but they’ll still have the old salary price bands in their head.
And the people doing the hiring haven’t had inflation tracked wage increases ever. They’re actually losing money year on year but they still think £30k is a good mid level salary because it was in 2000.
As an American (sorry) I am regularly shocked at how low salaries in the UK are.
£50k is the new £30k I read somewhere else
Companies have always offered the absolute minimum they’ve needed to. That’s capitalism.
I don’t know why the public finds it so hard to grasp that every company is trying to make as much money as it can and it doesn’t care about morals.
Probably because anyone on minimum wage looks at £30k as a great improvement, which is an awful lot of people. When you’re stuck working at minimum wage for too long you lose a sense of value in the work you do and to think someone might pay you 20% more is wild.
Current band 3 NHS worker who’d love £30k, but the job I do holds a special place in my life so I’m less inclined to apply for a job that takes me away from my role.
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Because they can pay that much and people still apply.
Companies don’t decide what salary to pay. They pay smallest amount they have to, to get the attributes they want.
They won’t pay people more if they don’t have to. The whole world has been pushing to force people into taking less for more. In my line of work they pay freezed the slary for 5 years and then went below inflation for every year after that. Everyone now works incredibly hard for less pay and it’s something that has been happening since 2008. Sadly if you look at the richest 0.1% their profits and portfolios have increased by an insane amount in the same time frame. It’s very sad all around tbh
Because they’re trying to take you for a desperate fool. Don’t fall for that schitt. Alternatively, join up and then give their customers a really effing hard and tough time, just for fun.
Having a degree doesn’t really mean much anymore, it just gets you past the initial filter. Also the country just is poorer now, you can’t pay millions of people 80% wages to stay at home and not expect a massive economic hit.
Because we as the public accept it as a good salary. When I was a kid we were taught that public service roles were good jobs but a teacher’s starting pay is £31,650, a nurse starts at £29,970, police constable at £29,907.
I’m on 24.5K and wanna die.
Anyone else notice that trade work also tends to max out at around 40k? Mate of mine is an electrician for the council and has been stuck on £41k despite doing nights and several different things like fire alarms, rewires and communal lighting
Because each year a degree get less and less valuable as more and more people have them. A quick Google suggests around 900,000 people graduate from a bachelors program in the UK per year.
Nautally you’ll get loads of people of reasonable intelligence and work ethic happy to accept a job for 30k or less as its so competitive. Even years after graduating.
The only thing to protect you from this is to have niche skills you don’t need an employer to train you up in.
But even niche skills won’t earn you much if its in a popular area without lucrative profits. While a PhD in theoretical physics requires a lot of intelligence the pay for jobs is low as universities produce more physicists than there are jobs. Most have to retrain to something like software, teaching, engineering or data science. I had loads of physics teachers in school with PhDs.
Salary is not causally related to hard work and/or intelligence and never has been.
That said wage growth in the UK isn’t terrible this year compared to previous years, at least according to the Financial Times (even if you don’t feel it).
£30k seems a reasonable starting rate for a degree level job. The idea is you progress to higher levels within that discipline that pay more as you gain experience. A graduate doctor doesn’t just walk into a GP job or a consultant role on £100k per year.
Amongst other things people have mentioned, I do think people who were on £30k years ago don’t realise how much less that same £30k is worth these days. I remember my second job paying that and being over twice minimum wage and it felt great.
I know it’s not a great salary these days but I still just automatically think it’s a decent wage when I hear people complain about it and have to remind myself that £30k these days is nothing like the £30k I earned.
I’ve recently taken to the Moto “do the jobs that nobody wants”. For too long I was competing for the same jobs that everyone else wants so competition was high and there’s no incentive for the company to actually care.
Applying this strategy I’ve just accepted a role that has a training salary of £41.5k, expands to £50k once training is complete and it also comes with a. £6k yearly bonus. It comes with undesirable lodging requirements but it’s a 86% pay rise on the high end!
Because it is (In comparison to min wage)
It doesn’t seem so long ago that £30k was the level of ‘just about established in my career’ and employers often think it’s still the case. I’m forever pushing for bigger hiring budgets for mid level roles, but those above me just aren’t with the times.
I’d go so far as to say £5k above min isn’t bad from what i’ve seen. £2-3k above minimum wage isn’t unusual for fairly junior but still skilled office workers with degrees, and more importantly the role comes with levels of responsibility and out of hours dedication that just aren’t worth that uplift.
>> Anyone else notice
Yes. Everyone has noticed. Seems you’re a bit slow on the uptake
I’m on 40k and I just can’t save
Been on 24k for 7 years purely out of selflessness. I was meant to find a better job but then COVID hit and my, then, overstaying partner lost her source of income and I had to cover the rent etc. We finally got a partnership last year but I feel anxious as fuck to find a new job.
the more BS thing is the benefits they list.. as if they are doing us a favour giving us statuary (sp?) holidays, or tea/coffees..
The UK is saturated with people who are skilled at service industry jobs. All service industry roles that are not IT can get 100s of applicants when posting minimum wage.
So why would a company increase the wage when they don’t have to…
Want to get paid more? Work outside of the service industry.
Trades are crying out for workers and you can earn a good living being one.
Better then 24k lol
Welcome to capitalism! Where it’s all about profits, profits, profits.
If your paid £50 k in HR to pretend it is, you will
I must be out of the loop. I’m basically broke and have spent the last few years scraping by as a freelancer. 30k would be a dream for me.
Pessimistic view says companies will pay the minimum required to obtain/retain colleagues capable of average delivery.
Realistic view says the above factors in but £30k is also around median wage so statistically it is ‘good’ because there are a lot of lower wages out there. The big question is we know that some CEOs earn £14 Million a year (with some even higher).
The core of the problem for me is we keep looking at wages in a nominal way vs inflation when we need to take account of relative wage gaps vs inflation.
I was talking with my manager about this. His reply was: you should be thankful you have a job. I was dumbfounded.
I’m in top 3 of our department of 17 people so he didn’t mean it like I’m useless or anything. I can’t imagine what his reply to the lowest performer would have been.
I’ve just tried negotiating a new salary in a new job which basically in real terms is less than I was on 3 years ago before I moved companies and gained a lot more experience and diversity.
Job hunting was depressing, not just because the market was so slim, but because the jobs that you did see and get excited to click ‘apply’ on would inevitably involve a call with a member of the talent team where you’d be told of a laughably low salary.
Whatever you do, don’t look at equivalent jobs in the US and compare their salary vs state tax rate. Even adding healthcare on top it’s stark how shit the pay in the UK is
Yep.
I saw a job announcement for lead technical producer at a London based left wing ‘comradely’ news channel, advertised at £34,944.
I enjoy the channel and support their work, but that salary is insulting.
Because not enough people join Unions.
Because companies will pay the minimum they can get away with and not enough people are Unionised.
According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, £1 in 1988 is worth £2.73 now. I started on a graduate salary of £10k in 1988, so not far off £30k in today’s money. This was roughly what you expected unless you were going into finance or something. In the south where I was you could afford to live in a house share on that and not feel too skint but you would have struggled to rent anywhere on your own.
They’d rather you be an intern and have you do the same for nothing.
From the perspective of a small business owner, it has a lot to do with customers wanting to pay the absolute minimum for our services. It is very easy to shop around for competitors and go with the lowest offer. So we have to keep our costs to a minimum, and the biggest cost by far is employees. It’s simply free market economics playing out.
In my industry you get skilled, high pressure office jobs going for what is now literally minimum wage. Then the major companies complain when the people they hire turn out not to be any good.
I’ve recently been made redundant so set myself to open for work on LinkedIn. An agency got hold of me for “a fantastic local opportunity”.
A senior position for £28k.
I’m currently on £62k.
No one ever mentions wages being stagnant in this country so might be worth passing this on to chancellor
I’m love to earn £30k a year. Not had a pay rise from 27k in 2 years
Try working for the NHS, literally everything below a Band 5 is below 30k
Because people keep acting like 50k is unimaginable wealth
30k? yes please. I currently get the chance to face real honest physical harm every day at work for less.
Supply and demand. A company offers a £30K salary for a range of skills and gets a fit, then that’s the market value for those skills. If the company draws a blank, then they either have to raise the salary, or think again.
A lot of this comes from the older generations for who 30k WAS a good salary when they were younger. Unfortunately companies are most often run by these cretins and they keep the wages low so that they can earn higher salaries and big fat bonuses themselves. The rest of society perpetuates this outdated notion because it’s been drilled in to them their whole lives.
It is what they can get away with, it is rubbish. Short while ago for interest I looked up a job I was getting paid £28k for in 1994, looks like it is about £32k now. Damn sure just inflation over that period means it ought to be more or less doubled.
What you going to do, find a job paying more lol
Because it’s good for them if you believe it.
It’s pretty amazing how quickly the World has moved especially financially. In 2015 I got a management job at £28k and it was consider a good salary, I manage admin/reception/support staff and they were all earning £21-24k also seems good for the role. Now most my team are on the edge of £30k and I’m on £42k which is fair for the job roles they are but amazed when skilled roles are advertised for £30k when my office admin are earning that for non-skilled roles
When I started working in IT in around 2008 you would start on around £21k which was higher than entry level office jobs.
Now there are a lot companies advertising the roles for slightly more because of the minimum wage.
Accounting for inflation it should be £33,500 PA
It isn’t the last 5 years it is getting on for 2 decades.
Also for reference a good employer like the one I work for will offer up to £30k for a 1st line with a bit of experience, so if you think that salary sounds amazing I would suggest working for a managed service provider(MSP) for a couple of years to get some experience and then build an IT career off of that.
I have been retired for 12 years from the oil and gas industry but back then those underpaid jobs were filled by young Asian graduates who blithely thought the rates would cover living costs here. The scales dropped from their eyes on arrival
The only real answer: because they’re cunts.
When I graduated university in 2008 and entered the graduate workforce on 16k a year 30k was “I’m set for life money”
I’m in a very fortunate position to have ended up earning 50k for the last few years and while things are not tight (I live in an incredibly cheap area) it’s certainly not the financial freedom I thought it would be
Wages have absolutely stagnated while everything else goes up. It’s very regional too, my friends where I’m from have houses and kids even though they are probably on or around 30k whereas my friends who live in SE England are alot more mixed on those that managed a house and family and those who didn’t.
At our place the overheads have increases by about 25% over the past few years and the rest of the business is fairly static. Everything is being squeezed.
I think many of them have managers that were ordinary workers during the 1990s and 2000s when living standards and wages were rising. 30k to them was potentially what 50k means today (not rich but well to do). Their experience of the corporate world solidified before 2007 and some of them potentially go about their daily lives that this didn’t happen
As someone who has just been made redundant after 15 years, I am dreading looking for another job…
A central part of capitalistim is competition, that goes for wages a well. Without that external pressure and competition stagnation happens.
Companies inherently want to pay the minimum possible so in general will only do the bare minimum needed to get someone of the skillset they want.
As such the competition has to come from an external pressure since most companies are all in agreement and act the same.
This external pressure has been removed as no longer are skilled professions paid well in the public sector. The literal decade and a half of pay freezes, cuts, removal of pay increases even performance related ones, so on and so on, have all stopped this external pressure private companies faced.
Now they don’t have to compete so we get stagnation.
This is why anytime people cheer on politicians for actively surpressing public sector pay, especially in professions, it is laughably short sighted and directly harms the country as a whole.
Capitalistim needs competition to remain healthy. There is no longer competition for wages.
Depends on the sector but my own hadn’t seen funding increases in 5 years therefore the market wouldn’t stand an increased cost , therefore salaries had to be kept inline with what the product/ service can reach to stop the company going bankrupt. Not all companies have millions in the bank !
When I was on minimum wage I looked at 30k as this aspirational goal I would one day live comfortable on.
I recently got a 35k salary, after about 5 years of working up (was on 27 before my recent promotion), and whilst yea, it’s nicer than minimum wage – I’m stressed constantly, overworked, barely enjoy my free time because I’m thinking about work constantly and for all that for a similar disposable income I had when I was just above minimum wage 5/6 years ago.
This modern world is a con for the working classes.
I saw a £25k salary advertised as competitive last week.
For a full time job that’s basically minimum wage.
The problem is minimum wage is an arbitrary number.
Most businesses can barely afford to pay minimum wage for what are low skilled low output jobs.
When minimum wage goes up the money has to come from somewhere.