Trade bodies want ‘national living wage’ cut – it isn’t enough now!
![Theresa May promised to bolster the prospects of the poorest [Image: Villard/SIPA/Rex shutterstock].](https://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/160809-Theresa-May.png)
Theresa May promised to bolster the prospects of the poorest [Image: Villard/SIPA/Rex shutterstock].
For it to be an actual living wage, the amount paid by bosses to employees would have to be enough to ensure they did not have to claim any state benefits.
That should be perfectly acceptable to business bosses. They should not expect the taxpayer to subsidise them – especially when they take home huge fortunes in their own pay.
The UK’s top bosses gave themselves an average 10 per cent pay rise in 2015, with the average amount rising to £5.5 million.
Including pensions and bonuses, typical boss pay is now 129 times more than employees.
These are bosses of FTSE100 companies, which are predominantly hugely successful multinationals.
And they have the cheek to call for a reduction in an inadequate and misnamed ‘living wage’!
If Theresa May has any steel in her, she’ll tell these greedy executives to remodel their businesses – starting with the amounts they give themselves.
Downing Street has dismissed pressure to slow the implementation of the ”national living wage” in the face of lobbying from businesses concerned about rising salary bills.
The policy, which is expected to raise the minimum wage for the over-25s to approximately £9 an hour by 2020, was the centrepiece of George Osborne’s 2015 budget.
It emerged on Monday that at least 16 trade bodies have written to the business secretary, Greg Clark, urging him to reconsider the plans in light of the economic slowdown expected after the UK’s vote to leave the European Union.
The Treasury is braced for a wave of lobbying in the run-up to new chancellor Phillip Hammond’s first autumn statement, as trade bodies and other interest groups seize the opportunity of a new minister in charge to try to win concessions.
Hammond used a recent trip to China to promise a reset on economic policy. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) is also expected to make sharp downgrades to its forecasts for growth when it publishes its latest projections alongside the autumn statement.
The national living wage policy already makes some allowance for a downturn in economic growth because it is set in relation to median wages, and is targeting 60% of media UK pay by 2020. The minimum wage for over-25s rose by 50p an hour in April to £7.20 as a result.
Source: No 10 to proceed with ‘national living wage’ despite pressure | UK news | The Guardian
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For it to be an actual living wage, the amount paid by bosses to employees would have to be enough to ensure they did not have to claim any state benefits yet they tell they say no no we cant afford it while getting another payrise ontop of millions ouch sounds like norman law
The governments no better with its freeze on benefits when the cost of everything has risen!
Any idea who these trade bodies are?
Never mind the trade bodies, who are the organisations influencing the trade bodies, unless their doing this off their own backs? I have an ever growing list of organisations who remain at the bottom for my preference purchases. Names would be good, to boycott these, they are the same businesses whose shareholders & hierarchy consumes the wealth of organisation’s while fleecing the workers. A change of both culture and management is required in the same vein as Corbyn’s assault on ‘so-called’ neo liberalism to get these to consider their options.
The wages in this country are a joke, nobody can live on them, except the politicians, who get paid more than they’re worth!
You forgot to mention the “tax free” bonuses which are so exorbitant that their salaries pale to insignificance, which is why the basic tax rate should see a hike upwards for the wealthier. We can use those revenues raised to pay the increase in benefits if the laughable “living wage” is reduced.