Todays society

do you honestly think I care in the slightest what you or anyone else thinks of my opinions? I don't believe what I believe to be popular. And its only because of people like me that this place isn't a right wing echo chamber

 

Its actually FTSE 100 companies. which is in statistical terms a tiny proportion, but those companies employ large numbers of people in this country.

So that increase in income shouldn't be shared with the workforce who you know, do actually work at said companies and are as responsible for the rise in income as the CEO is? Like if they don't employ anyone to deal with that extra business, it isn;t money in the bank. Saying the reason CEO and executive pay is out of control is because people can order things online now is ridiculous.



Yes and it was a disgrace in the 80s so what excuse do we have to be having the same problem now? How big does youth unemployment need to be for you to recognise it as a serious problem? 50%? 60%? 100?%

 

That's exactly what I said. You're judging it against a tiny proportion that have no bearing on your life. Its not even all FTSE 100 companies, it's a tiny minority of those where the top wages 'a 1000 tines times the average'. Your comparison that it was 'previously 100 times' is still true for many of the FTSE companies.

They're the top 100 CEOs in the country who are responsible for about £2Trillion of revenue and £300billion of profit. Of course they're paid a lot when they're directly responsible for companies with those sorts of figures.

It's pointless though you might as well compare our wages to the top 100 footballers in the country. It would make just as much sense.

If you're the top 100 of anything in an income generating field you will be paid astronomically.

The mistake people make is thinking that if those 100 people got paid less the companies would boost up the other employee's wages - they wouldn't. They're not paying people £25k because they can't AFFORD to pay them £35k (the profits prove this, there's an enormous amount of leeway) its because that's the going rate in the job market and what people will accept to perform the role they are required to do. The company saving £2m on CEOs wages won't alter what people will accept.

And to say the explosion in revenue hasn't directly affected CEOs wages is clearly nonsense.

As for unemployment, I didn't say it wasn't an issue now. I was saying that the perception that "this generation has it the most difficult of any generation ever" clearly falls down when you compare it to previous ones. Employments statistics (and the quality of those jobs) are another example that it is a similar struggle that the current generation are going through as most in history......with massive additional benefits alongside it.

 

it should be made easier to unionise, and the right to sack someone for no reason within however many months that Cameron brought in should be repealed. At the same time, we need to engender a serious working culture change, because we need employers and unions to stop seeing each other in such an adversarial way. That on it's own causes a lot of industrial trouble. I would commission a study of german working culture, where businesses and unions take a much more collaborative approach and see how we could apply any lessons we learnt from there over here. Because you cant make it easier to unionise if all the unions still want to bring govts down and I totally accept that, however it's gone too far the other way now. A huge area where we can help young people right off the bat is an end to zero hours contracts. I don't care what anyone says, I've worked on loads of these at this point and the flexibility they supposedly offer was never in me or my colleagues favour. I was reduced to kissing arse all the time because if your boss decides they dont like you for whatever reason, you just won't get work which isn't right in a modern society that glad hands itself about how fair it is.

I think the minimum wage should rise, with subsidies in place for small businesses who would be likely to struggle with the cost increase until they can (no permanent subsidies). people are paying over 50% of their take home pay on rent in some cases (I actually paid 60% towards rent pre pandemic and my rent actually went up in August), and this has implications for tax revenue alongside other things. If people are paying so much for basic living costs, they are not spending that money elsewhere in the economy, which hurts tax revenues. So unless we increase the social housing stock or affordable house building (which property developers will not let the govt do despite sitting on insane amounts of land they deliberately don't use to artificially inflate prices), we need to look at rent caps or some sort of market control, to deal with the worst excesses of the system. The simple fact is that money is more useful to us all being spent in the productive economy instead of a landlords back pocket because they've stuck £100 on the monthly rent.


This is not exhaustive in any way and I actually had to delete over half this post, because this is pretty much the first time anyone on this forum has asked me that and genuinely wanted to know so I have a lot of ideas to get through.

 

Ive never ever ever ever ever said this generation had it the most difficult ever or anything remotely like that you put those words in my mouth.Thats what you want to think I think because it justifies your viewpoint. I just want people to take these issues fecking seriously instead of saying well it was worse in the 80s so its fine now and dismissing it out of hand. I don't give a shit when it was worse because recognising which was worse doesn't benefit anyone

 

I thought you'd said that continual generational progress had been halted, today's young had been systematically shut out of any economic opportunities, housing standards are worse, etc, etc? If I've paraphrased that then I apologise but I didn't actually say you'd said it personally, more that it's a perception of this generation.

I don't particularly feel the need to justify my viewpoint. As I've said all along every generation has challenges but also massive opportunities and benefits.

This one has the challenge of living after a property boom and through a pandemic but the opportunity is still there. Choosing to apply the focus onto what other people earn is a good example of looking in the wrong direction to no end goal.

 

Thats fine aaron but its not fair at all to treat me as a spokesman for the generation is it? you yourself are an example of the fact we aren't all a homogenous group with the same ideas and opinions. You're also ignoring the ginormous essay I just wrote to rogered detailing just exactly some of things i think we should do to achieve societal change. I'm not just sat here moaning because people earn more than me, again thats you just trying to caricature me

Fine, I dont feel the need to justify mine any further and we can call it a day here

 

Can I answer that RT... ?

You vote for it..................but oh look, nobody did

Cue another lengthy rant from YN...

 

First time we've interacted in a while and you still talk rubbish, glad to see some things never change

 

I appreciate that a lot bud, as I said to Aaron the main thing I want is people to actually just even recognise these as valid issues rather than assuming I'm playing tragedy top trumps with people.

 

The housing situation is a mess and those trying to buy or even rent have a hard time, Both Labour and Conservative are to blame, Labour under Blair/Brown deliberately built fewer houses to keep house inflation up as it counted towards the growth figures in the economy they boasted about, The Tories are not interested in social housing and denied councils the power to borrow to build new social housing while allowing them to be sold off to tenants ending up in the private rented sector while relying on the private sector and market forces to build new houses for sale, The combination of bad policies by both Labour and Conservatives are to blame for continually not building enough houses and thus keeping prices high because of supply and demand not been balanced.
The irony of the Thatcher policy of selling off council houses to tenants at huge discounts to create her dream of a house owning nation has spectacularly failed as home ownership actually declined as they were sold by the tenants at profit from the discount to private rental companies.Thus reducing the social housing supply

 

Totally agree trevor, successive governments have failed to tackle this issue for various reasons which has left us in the situation we are in. Also agree that whilst Thatcher wanted a home owning nation, we are now dealing with the unintended consequences of her housing policies.

 

But you inadvertently omit to mention the hundreds of thousands of immigrants (legal or otherwise) that have severely added to the demand for housing over the last few years, yes even under the tories, therefore we are not just short of houses but overstocked with people...yes ?

 

If housebuilding was kept up to consistently by governments of all stripes and particularly affordable housing, immigration would not put the pressure on housing stock it currently does. The simple fact on immigration is that if you want a state pension, get a boat and get some over yourself. Without mass immigration, we would have a serious deficit of working age people to contribute to the tax system, as our population is ageing and people are having less children. There's a direct correlation to education levels and how many children people have, which explains the ageing populations of many developed 'first world' nations for lack of a better word.

 

I probably don't agree with a lot of @YungNath posts but being 27 he is absolutely right on housing, I'm forced into expensive private renting which leaves it almost impossible to put any savings away. I'm hoping that the government backed 5% deposit mortgages might help a little but even then I need to probably look at 8k minimum for something I'd want to live in.

 

Thing is you've GOT to get on that ladder, soon as possible, all my siblings started off in terrace housing and have all moved up over the years, I started in a semi for 2300 then sold for 10000 after 8 years