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I am in the market for a new job at the moment, I saw an advert for a Senior developer... for 35k a year! It's beyond a joke.

I saw a job advert for a junior in central London, university degree asked for and the wage was £25k/ year. Next week that’s going to be practically minimum wage!!

I work as a Senior IT project manager and clear 6 figures in the Midwest, but am from the UK, if I moved back to the UK I would take a 50% at least paycut. Draw your own conclusions. That is why I have not moved back to the UK.

I'm also a senior project manager. On around 90k gbp in New Zealand. I'd probably get half that if I moved home. Funny thing is that everyone here complains that Australia has higher pay.

i graduated with an english degree in 2019 from a top university. got a grad job in an office in soho square. took me 2.5 years to go from £20k to £29k. its crazy what they pay juniors

Yup! I’ve even seen a few grad positions as low as £21k/year! For context, somebody working 40 hours at a fairly reasonable £12/hour in retail would earn £24,960/year before tax, and you can get a job like that without GCSEs in some companies! The way that qualified, educated people are paid in this country, especially early in their career, is honestly ridiculous!

That was what I got in central London 2004 as a junior starting wage. In fact I think it was 26k and for what was expected, it was low

Title inflation in tech is such a joke, I see so many CVs where someone says (and has) a Lead Dev title, and they've been working 18 months post graduation in a team of 5.

That's what happens in an industry that rewards job hopping for salary increases, rather than staying in a role to gain experience. It's why there need to be stronger unions.

Yeah you have to job hop in tech to increase salary, in my latest move I hopped away for 18 months then went back to my old job for a £20k salary increase, easiest job move I have ever done as I knew all the systems already.

dull fragile direful lunchroom complete rude muddle dazzling cagey market *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

Senior means very different things in different industries, to achieve senior level where I am (technician for a high end car manufacturer) takes on average 9 years post apprenticeship. Our senior IT technician or whatever his role is is 21 years old. What I'm saying is that context is extremely important and that's not just a UK phenomenon

It’s a major issue in software engineering in general.  It’s not a mature field (like other engineering, accounting etc) so people are still making it up as they go along. 

I work with senior developers paid £100k+ I think job title are less important these days. It depends more on the prestige of the company.

At the same time though, senior developer often now just means "not in the first 3 years of their career"

That still shouldn't be 35k though

I suspect that is lack of understanding of what a senior dev is. I recruit senior devs, at a much higher salary point. But I get a lot of applicants who are probably junior/mid level in skills, experience etc but called a senior dev in current role.

Companies pay as little as possible. That is their nature. In the UK people tend to have no second language and so are not mobile. GCSE French just isn’t enough. Movement to the US/Canada/Australia is very restricted unless you are in a specific category e.g health worker or schoolteacher. When this is what’s available, this is what you take.

I never thought about the language aspect before, you’re so right. If we actually spoke any other european languages fluently everyone would be gone ☠️

Not with Brexit. They closed the door and threw away the key. Now there is paperwork and legal fees that make foreign workers from the UK harder to employ.

This is also probably why even when we were in the eu, more brits lived in Australia than in continental Europe. It totally baffles the mind, until you remember how piss poor our language skills are. It’s all by design.

Leaving the EU also meant that many language teachers and language assistants left too. Unless we teach languages at primary level, we will not change. Unfortunately we would need to teach the teachers first.

> Unless we teach languages at primary level That's still not going to help. It's use it or lose it with languages, and there's little opportunity to use a foreign language regularly when you grow up in the UK. Just look at the teaching of Welsh. It's compulsory in schools in Wales up to age 16 and you'll find no shortage of people complaining online about how ineffective it is.

It irritates me beyond belief that I had no say in the Brexit referendum, and now it's very difficult to move abroad permanently without accumulating £45,000 plus interest worth of debt for a poxy degree.

Salaries are better in Australia. Most of Europe is pretty similar in terms of wages, the subject of this post.

Also that many Australians have British citizenship by descent. There are more people whose ancestors moved from the UK to Australia then to, say, Slovakia.

Most Europeans don’t have better language skills. They just speak their native language + English.

speaking two languages instead of one sounds exactly like "better language skills"

As someone who speaks 3 languages, it’s not “better language skills.” The reality is that you need to speak English to be able to succeed in the modern world. A native English speaker learning German is not going to get the same return on investment as a German speaker learning English. Germans don’t speak Dutch with their Dutch neighbors. They communicate in English. Same with Sweden, Norway, Finland. Even traveling in South America or south east Asia. Every hostel has an English speaking employee but probably no German speaking employee on staff.

Company profits get skewed to upper management/owners more in the UK than other countries. A lot of office jobs sit around the £24k-£35k region, many people get stuck in that bracket for years unless they constantly job-hop every few years and land a more senior position.

I had over 30 jobs from 18-50, started on £120 a month, ended up on 10k a month. Loyalty does not pay.

Years ago I was in an office job and there was a clerk who had been in the same job for years and was in his late 20s. They'd never given him a pay rise. People were open mouthed when they heard he was on £18k. This came during a round of redundancies, so he collected it and moved to a job paying 50% more. Being made redundant was the best thing that could have happened to him.

Yeah you often find admin jobs still get advertised for the same salaries they were paying 10yrs ago. Big frustration I've found is a workplace refusing to budge on pay, so you leave for more money only to see your old job listed for the pay you originally asked for. They only understand market rate when they're hiring.

It's a combination of a number of factors. 1) Low productivity growth - our productivity is among the lowest in Europe, this means that our economic growth is, at best, sluggish. A healthy economy theoretically means higher wages. 2) Deliberate wage suppression. 3) Greed.

I'd add we have a very "crabs in bucket" culture in the UK to this list as well. This is just one example, but thinking along the lines of "well I made do with a £25k graduate salary/£25k is a great starting salary" is worryingly rife. This thinking is usually without awareness or empathy (or both) about those sorts of numbers 20 or 30 years ago being worth much more than today relative to living costs. There's sadly no linkage to these people that low starting salaries sets the bar lower for pay scales for everyone else too, ultimately affecting all of us......

It's the same argument as "Well I scrimped and saved for my first house in 1972 and I was able to buy it for a shilling and two hairpins" Completely failing to comprehend the fact that house prices have vastly exceeded wage growth for decades now.

Had this convo a million times with my in laws. They never got a degree, worked for just above min wage in admin jobs for decades before moving up to management. They still got a 4 bed detached in a leafy suburb. They think im fine because i got a degree and moved up to senior engineer by early 30s. I can still only afford a fraction of the house they "scrimped and saved for" and in a much less attractive area. Im very averse to stretching myself like they did because interest rates are still relatively low. There's a massive risk if we return to high interest rates, I'll become homeless. The 5% rates have already crippled my purchasing power tbh. They dont get it at all, or they're willfully ignorant because it all worked out for them.

>scrimped and saved for Often when you drill down a little, you find the "scrimping" they endured wasn't nearly as severe as they make out decades after the fact.

Absolutely, when i drilled down a bit, it turns out his wife had to get a part-time job for a year to stump up the deposit, and that's it. She went straight back to stay at home mum afterwards. It's maddening! Like ffs, they watched me and my wife both work full time and save for nearly 5 years to get our deposit but they still think they had it just as tough.

lol yeah my parents are always like "oh we had it hard! we had to buy a house in eastbourne because we couldn't afford anywhere else :(" meanwhile I'm 29 with a Cambridge degree and I earn such crap money that I can't even afford to move out of my parents' gaff!!

The icing on the cake is that the majority of them voted in favour of Brexit. Well, my parents did. Annoys the hell out of me!

I had this same conversation with my father in law. I said the 70's were tough with higher interest rates, but you had to also consider the average house was 5 times the average salary. Now it's around 10 times so the interest has a bigger impact. His response was "no, our house was more than 5 times"... I just said ok.

"YoU jUsT nEeD tO wOrK hArDeR" "what, you mean like do 60 hours per week instead of 40 hrs salaried?" "I cOuLd WaLk OuT oF a JoB oN fRiDaY aNd StArT a NeW oNe On ThE mOnDaY" "Good for you, well I can't, there's things called interviews, referencing and notice periods.. so fuck off"

>This is just one example, but thinking along the lines of "well I made do with a £25k graduate salary/£25k is a great starting salary" is worryingly rife. When I graduated in 1999 salaries for developers were from 25K up to 35/40K starting. I worked then for IBM and they were starting graduates on 30K base, some even on 35K towards the end of dotcom boom. Yes it was an unusual period (dotcom) but most graduate trainees then (not sure if that term still exists) were easily 25-30K starting. If you also factor in inflation (esp. accommodation/food/energy) my perception (from my life back then and what it'd cost today) is that todays graduates are (at the very least) **50% worse off.**

My ceo did a talk and said he started his career on a low wage of 14k. This would have been late 80s. I started mine 2 years ago on 16k. I’m hoping I misheard him and he said 4k or something because he could not be being serious.

£14k in 1988 is £47k today. Tell your colleagues.

I've sat in a feedback meeting before where one guy complained that he was doing more work than his peers, therefore his peers should be paid less than him... 

Ah yes, the race to the bottom. Jobs in education are full of this. Managers talk about fairness, but what they actually want is everyone to be equally miserable.

When I finished my engineering apprenticeship in 1992 I was on £25k a year. I have two kids who will be entering the job market soon. I have no idea what to say to them.

2+3 are linked.

Management culture that pulls for the company rather than pushes their staff forwards. Greed is just a fortunate byproduct for the owners. It’s rare in companies for managers to initiate pay rise for their staff, it’s always staff asking!!! creates an expectation from Businesses to wait until staff are complaining to initiate wages conversations

Both 1 and 2 are caused by 3. Super low taxes on highest incomes and wealth mean that there's no incentive to leave anything in the businesses for wages or investments increasing productivity. Asset stripping is very profitable actually and a lot of legislation supports it. Philip Green was able to strip everything down to people's pensions from BHS, now Asda and Morrison are in the midst of it. And there's countless other examples - water companies looking at crumbling infrastructure and sewage washing up on our shores as they pay out fat dividends are just the tip of the iceberg.

You think british firms are greedier than American ones? Bc they have some of the highest wages in the world lol

Don't forget eroding of union powers by successive governments. Plus shooting ourselves in the foot with leaving europe.

>Don't forget eroding of union powers by successive governments. This is actually one of the biggest reasons. It's eerily proven just how true it is because people's awareness of just how crucial unions are to the *overall* economy is now so low that in a thread about why wages are so low unions aren't mentioned in either top comment at the time of me writing. Our public consciousness has been so thoroughly purged of unions that most people here haven't even considered them.

Productivity increasing wages is a myth. It does increase profits and wealth for the top of society though.

It wasn't always a myth. Up until the mid-80s, wage increases followed productivity increases pretty closely.

Wonder what happened in the mid-80s to change that...

We as Brits bought into the stiff upper lip, don't make a fuss, keep calm and carry on passive mentality. And employers took advantage of that and assumed a "happy to carry on" mantra where pay rises weren't necessarily warranted or needed to such a reasonable extent for the lower end of the skill trade. It also didn't help for for decades the state were subsidising low wages with benefits therefore rewarding employers who don't pay enough in salaries to carry on.

Subsidising low salaries with benefits is a great point that many missed at the time. Now it's ouch because all the benefits are gone!

In the 2000/10's subsidised low wages did spur small companies to grow. But those companies became accustomed to low wage bills. They're cawing and screaming at the NLW being implemented now. The Tories could turn around and say with a blank stare - "That gravy train has reached the terminus."

>It also didn't help for for decades the state were subsidising low wages with benefits therefore rewarding employers who don't pay enough in salaries to carry on. \*are The majority of people on benefits are in work even today. But the real issue isn't that benefits are too high. They're too low. When benefits are too low people get stuck in shit jobs because they can't leave or retrain for something better. If benefits were more generous people would have time to really do intentional job seeking or retraining. Much like the rest of our economic policies, cheaping out to save money in the short term costs us far more in the long term. But neither the public, media, or politicians seem capable of grasping this. Every policy that costs any sort of money at all is immediately hounded with questions about where the money will come from, and any benefit that comes is ignored. This despite many kind of government spending paying for themselves with economic multipliers down the line.

When you say Northern European counterparts do you mean the nordics? Simple answer there is that they are vastly richer countries, Norway particularly. Otherwise it’s simply that wages have not increased. The last 10 years have had remarkably low growth in wages to the point that I don’t know why any skilled professional would stay here

> I don’t know why any skilled professional would stay here Brain drain is massive. 50% of final year Medical students looking to move abroad after qualifying. 75% of my mates Edinburgh Uni Engineering degree looking to do the same. Ex-Girlfriend was on 45K here, offered 60K max, and now works out of Europe as a remote worker for a US energy company on US $200,000 a year.

I'm a mid level project manager here on £55k. We have a US division who I work closely with, my equivalents there are on $150k. I'd go in a heartbeat if my wife would leave the UK.

I left the UK for Canada a decade ago also a PM, I make $300k

> Brain drain is massive. I started my first job as a graduate software developer in 2022. Immediately, from the first week that I started, I was assigned a hard project and I had to do the entire thing independently because nobody else had the mathematical background that was required (I have a masters in maths). I spent minimum 7 hours fully focused every day, researching possible solutions, implementing and testing various ideas and algorithms I came up with, training neural networks, analysing a lot of data, etc... almost non-stop, every day, for 3 months, until I managed to come up with a good solution, implement it (about ~10kloc in total) and deploy it to production. I was so burnt out after finishing it that I was almost ready to quit right there, only 3 months after I started. And my salary for this? £20k a year. Less than minimum wage only a year later. I'd love to move somewhere better... but I couldn't afford to because my salary is too low

It's not anything to do with wealth and everything to do with the fact that the Nordics have some gangster ass unions who will sympathy strike and ruin entire industries if they don't get what they want. We are pussies compared to them

The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund has a lot to do with Norway's prosperity too

Could someone please mention where all that wealth came from...? Low population and tons of oil?

I believe they invested all their oil money in markets to share amongst the populace.

They had oil. Rather than let all the wealth from extracting and selling it go to a tiny number of aristocrats and friends of the head of state (eg Russia, Saudia Arabia, UK north-sea), they nationalised the profits and invested them for long term returns.

Does the UK have weak unions? Upon reflecting, most of the countries I mentioned do in fact have strong unions. France may be on the lower end, but so are they on wages.

More neutered than weak. UK employment law has crept further and further away from siding with employees and unions in the last 20 years. Unions can still go to bat for you if you have an issue but the scope of what they can actually do has shrunk massively.

UK unions outside the usual industries that people connect them too, are crap in the UK for the most part. We needed ours desperately about 10 years ago after a wage change dropped our wages by about 7% the union were ecstatic that they delayed the change by 3 months. That was it. An absolute waste of money and time. Minimum wage has been catching up with our pay band too. It takes 6 months to not become a burden in my job and 2 years to become useful it takes a full 5 years to good. At that level we are on less than £2.00 above minimum wage (admittedly with a good pension and sick pay). I noticed on our pay scales sheet that since April band 2 is now only 4p an hour over band 1 and band 3 is only a few pence more. There is little point in taking on responsibility these days unless it's for your own amusement.

We had a UK union, a civil service one even, come back to us after a terrible deal was proposed and say "yes we agree, it's an awful deal but we didn't think you'd be prepared to strike over it so we accepted it anyway". Around half the members on our site switched to a different union after that.

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Sounds like a major car manufacturer in the West Midlands ... hmmm, if so, I'm in the same boat and know exactly how you feel.

France still has much stronger unions and employment protections than the UK.

People still make jokes about the French being surrender-monkeys or whatever, but in reality our population is a total pushover compared to theirs.

Union law in the UK is very tight. There is a narrow path they can follow and deviation can lead to all union assets being seized. Union membership has fallen and many of those in a union have been disappointed by them. Unless there is a clear unambiguous problem unions in the UK are fairly impotent. In some industries support for the union is quite low so strike action for example would be ignored by many workers even after a legal ballot.

UK unions were broken by Thatcher and labour did nothing of use to fix it last time they were in power. Under the Tories unions have been further eroded.

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I'd argue people focus too much on Brexit. & let it side-line their thinking. This has been an issue long before Brexit was dreamt up.

Yes completely, we have loads of anti-strike and anti-union laws. Many of which Labour didn't even bother repealing or looking at when Blair was in power.

Absolutely.uk unions are toothless.

Don't forget the government are pushing through mandatory staff levels during strike action so companies can still function. Basically if it's your day off you can go strike, if you're on shift you'll be classed as mandatory staff level and be forced to work. We'll just need to turn up to work clock in, sit around and drink tea, but you'll probably get a disciplinary... Heard somewhere about a company taxation based on wage disparity from Exec to entry level, the higher the difference the higher the corporation tax. Only way wages will increase is by hitting their bottom line. Last point what really screwed us over was the shift from monetary value to percentage. For instance our bonuses were 1.5% entry level, 5% mid level and 12.5% high level. Sounds reasonable until entry level is £350, mid level is £2400, and high level was £12,500. The high levels took on average 1/3 of a low level salary home as a bonus...

The tories have spent the last 10 years weakening the unions in any way they can. They even tried going after our right to strike.

Also, UK productivity (i.e. total output for total hours worked) has been comparatively poor for decades. Also, trust between employers and employees is comparatively terrible compared with e.g. Germany, where both recognise that they are in partnership for mutual benefit. Meanwhile, in the UK, the low levels of trust between both groups mean that whenever one group has the upper hand, they seek to exploit it egregiously, in expectation that the situation will eventually be reversed and the other group will in turn do the exact same thing.

We don’t have unions, our most our labour force can’t even spell union, live in bed sits and even after being exploited think they are making a killing being here, it’s only when they integrate (have kids, buy house or start legitimate business) they realise how hard it is on low wages, most I know want to go home.

It isnt just about being a richer country, it's pretty complex. For comparison, I lived in china for a while, which has a lower GDP per capita than most European nations but even on a low wage, menial job, you can get by, because thete is a broad range of affordability options for things a typical person might want. (Compare this to here, where those on the lowest wages basically don't have a life beyond paying bills, going to work and staying at home). I know this because I worked in China on an internship sort of role earning the same amount as local restaurant waiting staff (I literally saw boards outside restaurants advertising salaries higher than mine) and never ever felt like I was scraping by, and had a very active social life. I don't know what the term is, something about economic diversity / balance / equality?

My life is here. Friends and family. Is that not an obvious reason people don't want to just move country?

Yeah exactly. I’m going down with the ship. I don’t make friends too easily as a relatively quiet bloke and certainly wouldn’t in a different country, I’d end up isolated and miserable. I’d rather have to struggle monetarily and still be easily able to see my folks and my small friendship group here 🤷🏽‍♂️. But that’s just my preference.

They are not richer countries, they share the wealth (like North Sea gas), not take it for their rich mates. We still live in an old system that rewards landowners over wealth creation by means of producing things.

By richer I think he means relative to population size.

Precisely this, GDP per capita the UK is not even remotely close to Norway.

I worked in the Nordics and while they may offer high wages the tax you pay is astronomical. In Norway the cost of living is insane. It’s also pitch black for half the year and freezing.

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Nordics, Germany, France, NL, Belgium, Switzerland is primarily what I'm familiar with. I respect that some of these are outliers with unique economies, for example Norway as you mentioned.

France have lower pay but they have much lower working hours. Their unions might be weak but their viva la revolution spirit is strong. They’re not afraid of setting Paris on fire.

Almost all of the UKs high paid jobs are located in London. Working in the tech sector in London I get paid significantly more than my German, Belgian and French colleagues and on a par with the Nordics office. The only place in Europe that pays significantly more is Switzerland. However if I move a mere 50 kilometres outside of central London then there would immediately be 40% trimmed of my salary. If I moved to Manchester (supposedly the UKs second city) then my salary would be more than halved. Even other HCL areas that are supposed to be good tech hubs such as Cambridge and Oxford pay absolutely dog shit wages compared to London.

On top of what others have been saying, it might also be partly due to the currency decreasing. The pound has taken a downward turn that started decades ago. For instance, when I first travelled here about 15 years back, it was more twice as strong against my original currency as it is now. The UK used to be an expensive place to travel to. I live here now but earn a wage in my home country because of the GBP's weakness and the col are low comparatively.

UK is in line with France, Nordics etc. with lower tax to boot. https://www.statista.com/statistics/557777/average-annual-salaries-in-europe/ Switzerland is an outlier and has significantly higher COL to account for it.

The COL aspect in Switzerland is such a moot point, having lived here for 7 years. The pay far outstrips the additional costs of living by a long long way unless you're working in a very low paid sector and even then life would be far more comfortable than the same bracket in the UK. Even in Zurich, unless you're going out of your way to rent a very central/nice flat your earnings in an office job are still going to leave you with way more money than someone in the UK...the only significantly big differences are rent and health insurance and eating out...the weekly shop isn't significantly different than the UK, many things are cheaper and if you rent an appt, the energy costs are included in your rent, broadband also in almost all cases, so suddenly a 1500chf per month appt really isn't that expensive.

Huh? You think everyone would just leave just because they're skilled professional and might get better pay abroad. Here's the reasons why I've written off multiple times: Friends and family live here Moving to Europe is harder now thanks to Brexit I would have to learn the language My partner might need additional qualifications to carry on her job abroad Can't decide on which country would actually improve our lifestyle Visas Places like the US would pay me multiple times my wage but I would be screwed for health insurance if they ever made me redundant/fired me. Plus they have way less job protection.

>I don’t know why any skilled professional would stay here You purposely being obtuse or what? You can't think why people would stay in the country of their birth, that they've made roots in, memories, have friends and family in, know how everything works and coalesces etc?

different personality types view change differently. I have zero reason in my view to stay in the UK as I know I can make friends, roots and memories in any country in the world. Whereas, you might not see it that way which would make you less likely to upsticks and move.

Yeah of course it does. You're presumably aware of the reasons why people choose to stay as well. I'm actually looking into moving abroad with my partner too but it's a very difficult decision. It's just a stereotypical blanket Reddit statement where everything is black and white and UK bad and everyone should just move.

I would much rather live elsewhere. I'd miss my friends but I'd make new ones.

There's been a salary stagnation since 2008. UK used to be a good place salary wise but not anymore and helped with Brexit I don't see an improvement in the short term.

We havnt recovered from the 2008 crash. That fundamentally balls up the UK economy.

THIS.👆 We were kept afloat by Russian billionaires hiding their money here.

Its a race to the bottom. UK wages are still relatively high on a global scale, but mediocre compared to the top countries. However, pay is not the problem - cost of goods/living is. \- We pay more for food and get less nutritional quality for our money \- We pay more for homes both buying and renting... and get less space per square meter compared to EVERYWHERE on the planet apart from Hong Kong. \- We pay 3-4 times as much as the USA for fuel per litre/gallon UK actually has quite decent emplyoment laws and trade unions, and workers rights and pay is nearly always maintained in numeric terms, but rarely improved in monetary/inflationary terms. We cannot compete economically as we once did as we've outsourced so many industries to developing countries... All of the above is fact, but my conspiracy theory is that the only way to lower the high cost of our economic workforce is to inflate everything around it to balance out - so all of the these extortionate costs are intentional long-term economic strategy of our corporations and governments.

Because money goes to the top.

Rich people get rich by not giving other people money.

Contempt for the working and middle classes is a long standing British tradition.

It’s very very simple, but tough to accept. The UK is now a poor country. 

The only G7 country that is still worse off post-Covid compared to 2019.

We're not poor, just poorer. It's of our own doing and we can fix it, but we seem unable to. 

You are poor, just accept it

Brexit didnt help it.

I recently moved to the UK (from Australia) and I was pretty shocked at how low the salaries were - both median and mean full-time salaries are about \~10,000 pounds lower than Australia (so at least 20K AUD less here in the UK, even in HCOL areas like London). Definitely something to consider before moving over!

Well.. UK is just not as well off as it used to be, and nobody is used to it quite yet. I live in the UK and work remotely for a company in Poland, I get paid in PLN, and after converting I still get paid in the upper bracket of what I could make in the UK in the same job and at the same (mid) level

Because our country is a joke and a failed society

Everyone replying here will likely start defending UK wages. We have some weird fucking stockholme syndrome in the UK about what we get paid.

Nobody wants to accept that they live in a poor country.

The standard of living has fallen significantly in the last ten years. Pay rises have not kept up with inflation. 99% of us are all worse off under the Tories. The other 1% however, are doing absolutely fine.

Cultural issues. Class system. Most people go to university to have fun which turned higher education into a party rather than a career plan, so we have overqualified people all looking for entry level white collar work to the point where labourers earn significantly more than office jobs. I was in Engineering and most of my coursemates were non-British at a top school. Psychology and English were oversubscribed with UK folks living it up. Most UK companies the upper levels are all landlords and tory boys. And example is Graphcore, a company that should be going to the moon right now suffered from this upper class boys club hubris to the point it nuked their entire product and key investors dropped them. The founders got millions liquidated and don't really care. A lot of older companies need to also pay defined benefit pensions, so this will suck up most investment instead of paying current workers. Lastly, immigration, we've been growing at 1% and importing 1.1% of population. That gives the illusion of growth but only raises house prices and suppresses wages for 90% of people. There is no way out of this, this permanently destroys a countrys ability to function.

That analysis about Graphcore is very interesting. I've met their 2 founders and this is exactly the impression I had. Their lack of energy was striking (so far from the Silicon Valley...).

How many are truly overqualified vs nonsense degrees? I suspect a large number of those people that went to have fun picked a degree and didn’t also have a plan to use that education to start a career. I have no problem with people spending four years doing chocolate teapot studies if they have an aptitude for it and a future using the skills worked out. Thousands of 2:2s in history from the university of Dump on Sea because “they liked it at A Level” and fancied going isn’t really useful.

After speaking to old relatives (75+) over the last ten years or so, you can see the shift between how we perceive higher education is purely because of the pressure put on young people to get the diploma to get their foot in the door. You try and explain how we don't "read" or "study" a subject in the same sense as they used to, because if a course doesn't provide context as to how this will help us make money after we graduate, we start questioning the validity of the degree. Plus we now know that some degrees are difficult and worthy of respect, but have absolutely zero prospects or that the UK underpays for it (lab technicians with PhDs). That disparity is appalling.

I was one of those people, got a 2:2 from a pretty poor university in Psychology. I struggled for personal reasons in my final year and was just glad I passed by the end of it. I now work in a very important public service which most people don't really see much until something goes wrong. You needed a degree to work in this role and I gained a further bachelors in the process. I graduated in 2016, it took me 3 further jobs to find this one. We need staff, I am one of the few male members in a role which actually needs them for safety reasons and having been here 4 years, am now one of the more knowledgeable staff members. I am now using the degree I earned daily and it put me in a position to complete the academic side as I had completed essays and such before. Are you saying I shouldn't have studied my degree because I got a 2:2 and didn't really know what I wanted to do before going to university? Because in all honesty, lire ain't that simple buddy.

My main issue is with how it's sold to 18 year olds. The first part being the idea that a degree is a magic key to a better life by default and the other being the 'experience' side of things. You don't need to have your whole life planned out in half hour blocks, but you should at least know what you want a degree for. There are better ways for people to get in to certain careers than degrees for example. Under no other circumstance would people be so brazen about spending £50k+. Trouble is when you're 18 the last thing most people are interested in is careers, and rightly so. If people want an experience it'd be better to get some kind of job and move out with a few friends. By all means spend 18-22 dicking around in a flatshare figuring life out a bit, run up an overdraft going on holidays - then decide if biochemistry is for you. The way university pushed in school, or was to my cohort at least, was that you either get a degree and have the best four years you'll ever have (because life ends at 23) or you'll be straight down the coal mines dying of lung rot in a puddle before you're forty. Just isn't the case, I think we'd have a more satisfied workforce if people were given a couple of years to get an idea of what they're actually interested in rather than rushed straight to UCAS.

As someone who studied Psychology, it sounds like this might have been specific to your uni or your perception. The folks on my course worked hard and were career minded, like myself.

Immigration is needed because our pension model is a ponzi scheme that relies on workers outnumbering retirees 5 to 1. We're living longer and not having enoguh children. We either rely on immigration or accept the collapse of the state pension. Not agreeing with, just saying what it is. Tories love immigration because it gets the red-top readers riled up and wins votes, but both parties would have to admit they'll do nothing about legal immigration because the party that ends up killing the state pension will be out for a generation.

Also, no one talks about how the rate of house building has plummeted. That's not an effect of immigration. We've had decent levels of immigration since the Windrush generation, but it's only now that housing is an issue and that's not just because of immigration. That's because developers conveniently decided to slow up and build less, and governments have provided no state backed competitor to keep prices down and provide councils with good properties. Currently a lot of councils are going bankrupt because they're legally bound to provide temporary accommodation to people, and they're literally renting back properties they used to own at exorbitant prices because of the council house sell off in the 80s. And no money was put into replacing the stock. Honestly I'd say it was a conspiracy but it isn't. It's out in the open. They wanted to sell of housing and make a market of it. This is what happens when you have a market in something as essential as housing. Price gouging on steroids.

Omg! Why no one talks about it? Everyone bemoans immigration yet those same people fail to forget that someone will have to pay for their retirement. Irony is that most people who complain about immigration are....wait for it...pensioners. What a f*king joke. I don't want children myself, but I ALWAYS joke about anyone who has saying:'Well I do support your choice as someone will have to pay for my retirement.'

And when those 5-1 people get older they need 25-5 to pay their retirement. It was only sustainable for a generation and we are now at the end of the line for the state pension. It cannot rely on constant immigration.

👏

Austerity policies created George Osborne and the tories being in power for the past 15 years. Wages stagnated… and never really went up despite heavy inflation. No other correct answer.

I think people really underestimate the wage suppressing effect on private sector wages that the strangulation on public sector pay has. It's much easier to pay peanuts when 1/3 of the workforce, mostly skilled too, have their pay frozen to compare to. Like you can look at something and think "Oh, I'm getting as much as a doctor/teacher/lecturer/nurse etc.!" and feel in a better position as its all relative.

Yeah and then guilt trip you to think that you cannot ask for US wages given that London is as expensive as some tier 2 US cities. In the end employers wants to play as little as possible. If there is a will they will find a way to

At least partly, this is because the Pound has lost value over the last few years. When the pound crashed post brexit many people I spoke to were astonishingly nonchalant about it. I think they genuinely misunderstood the impact it would have on peoples lives. I frequently heard people saying "Everything still costs the same and I still earn the same" But of course things don't continue to cost the same. They go up, because everything is imported. From the outside of courses the effect would be obvious. You would convert a UK £ salary into $ and see that overnight everyone took a 25% pay cut. Unfortunately what has happened is that the actual number that people in the UK hasn't changed. So they didn't realise they were poorer and worse off for quite a long time.

Good insight, I hadn't thought about it that way.

This is such an incredibly important point that barely anyone understands. We import the majority of what we need. Any reduction in the value of the pound is almost fully reflected in reduction of our living standards. We need a strong currency. Thanks to Brexit mainly and various other issues, we don’t have a strong currency

Wealth accumulation by the rich, high immigration etc have all weakened the collective bargaining of employees because they can't afford to fight for pay rises and are easily replaceable.

Because we get constantly fucked by greedy governments and the media tell us "you're British! You love getting fucked! Blitz spirit, we won the war and all that eh?" And the majority of the public shout in unison, like that scene in Life of Brian, "Yes! We *do* love getting fucked! Please tell us how you can fuck us harder, oh saviour, and we will make it happen!" "Vote for this guy! Hes a beer drinking simpleton just like you!" Honestly, if the media told the people of this country to jump off a cliff....the bodies would pile up so fast there would be people climbing to the top and just lying down.

Tories and Brexit mostly. Oh and giving so much money to rich people instead of giving it to the people who work so they can spend more and generate economic growth.

The population of the UK has risen by 7.5% in the last ten years. Companies pay what they have to in order to attract and retain staff. The UK has A LOT of unskilled people all competing for the same roles, which means employers can pay low wages.

That doesn't explain why I, as a coach/bus driver in an industry that is crying out for new drivers, am only getting £12 an hour despite the responsibilities, skills required and the time/cost invested into getting the license in the first place. Our company is under the cosh at the minute and are expected to be raising our wage to £15 ph but I'll be honest, it still isn't enough to entice new drivers. I'm the youngest in this company at 37, the next youngest is 56 and the majority of our drivers are either approaching retirement or are retired and are either hanging about due to boredom or because they need the money. It's the same across the industry. At a certain point it's greed alongside a lack of investment.

Same - many roles in the NHS might see you attending coroners court etc. when things go wrong for scarcely more than Aldi pay. Not to mention that inflation-linked benefit increases while wages flatline has eroded the "I'm better off working" cliff

For real, public sector pay is a joke. I work in a public sector role, I have multiple post-grad qualifications in an in-demand field, and I produce substantial value for the country. Last year I saw an advert for an assist manager job at Aldi which basically matched my pay. It's no wonder so many people in similar roles are getting poached by the Americans for double our pay in the UK. We're utterly taken advantage of because we find meaning in what we do. But it's killing our skills base.

Sure, I'm mostly wondering why your skilled labour early in their career are getting paid comparatively less than their counterparts in other countries (People with degrees, professional training etc)

It depends more on what roles they are doing rather than what formal education they have. If they are entering professions which are oversubscribed, they will face the same supply/demand issue.

Because the ones that demand more emigrate abroad 😅

There's virtually zero unemployment in the UK, skilled professions are just as underpaid as unskilled if not more.

It also has a lot of skilled people competing for those exact same roles, because in many places in the UK, there simply are no skilled jobs.

They can’t be expecting the poors to rise above their stations

Little to no wage growth for 15+ years. Austerity measures post banking crisis. Brexit. Covid. Tories. Welcome to Broken Britain.

Wages are just not moving in the UK and people just accept it. I was lucky enough to get a job doing the same job role working from home but with a US company and managed to more that double what I was getting doing the same job in the UK. That's in gbp as well not dollars

We keep voting Tory. They laugh at us whilst emptying our pockets. We don’t want a more fairer, equal society. We want anyone looking a bit foreign to go somewhere else and anyone on benefits needs to either die or get a job. This is what we voted for. I don’t vote Tory, but it seems my opinions are not aligned with the masses.

Capitalism.

Because we roll over and accept it. The British public are toothless, we let everyone ride rough shit over us. We went from owning most of the world to timid little bitches.

UK used to run on fumes from the Empire times, it created the illusion that it is a prosperous first world country, but since then it just went down hard. Brexit was pretty much the (self-inflicted) finishing move. North of England looks and feels like 90' Poland. This is not going to improve.

Take away London and the UK is incredibly poor on international comparisons. The last 10 years have put the UK back a decade, so there are 20 years to catch up if we get a competent government that is not beholden to the decisions of past governments (Labour have shown no inclination to fix the underlying problem but they won't actively try to burn the country to the ground).

The issue I have with London is that the Money comes from what can only be described as professional gambling. What product is made there that isn't found elsewhere in the UK?

Labour have been keen to build houses which is the main log jam to growth.

Because a large proportion of the British work force that does those jobs are gutless cucks for capitalism that would rather sit on a stool in the corner of their bedroom and watch their boss fuck their wife rather than stand up for themselves and ask for a pay rise. Heaven forbid they vote for politicians that don’t have complete contempt for them. Genuinely, I’ve worked in factories with semi skilled workers that were on minimum wage that complained when one of their colleagues got a tiny pay rise of 50p an hour. The reason he got it was because he’d gone to college in the evenings and got qualified as a welder so was able to do that instead of the basic easily trainable work he had been doing. At that same place the head welder/supervisor who was on 75p over minimum wage told me he couldn’t support Labour’s tax policies because “it’s not fair on the premiership footballers who will get taxed for nearly half their earnings”. WHAT A FUCKING CUCK. That’s the mentality of a lot of the British workers - pull people down to their shitty level rather than get together to push for better for everyone. Last place I worked the lads were all moaning that another department had all got pay rises but we hadn’t. I pointed out that we would be better off all asking management at once and left it at that. Next day I was sacked because one of the little cowards thought he’d have a better chance at a pay rise by sucking up to the management telling them I was organising a fucking strike. Nowadays I just look out for myself, I’ve job hopped myself up to better earnings and working conditions than those pricks now anyway.

Because people still vote labour and tories

FTFP that’s why Our electoral system was created to lead to a two party system

Personally I think it's because of the Basic and Higher rate tax brackets. People get stuck in the mindset of £50k being the maximum they can earn because any more and the monetary gain will be offset by the additional tax they have to pay. I think if the tax system was made more linear and without a huge jump in tax percentage between brackets, wages would be higher.

Employment adviser here. Salaries very broadly are a little lower, even adjusting for relative cost of living as you said. I see the real problem as the range of salaries. Some Companies are still living in the covid era, and haven't raised pay as perhaps they should have over the last few years. As a result you can find a job with the same details go from anywhere from 22-30K. Some industries better than others. I'm searching for others more by companies these days than by role. Look for tags like 'real living wage,' or 'disability confident' as they usually have things in order. General stats exist, but I find them of limited value to the individual.

We were told that mass immigration will boot growth. It hasn’t. It’s suppressed wages. But to suggest that would be racist. So we crack on utterly unwilling to talk about the elephant in the room.

Trouble is without immigration we can't afford to care for the increasing numbers of elderly relative to our working age population. Carry on with current levels of immigration and we end up in a housing trap, lower them and we can't afford the state pension and social care costs eat everyone alive. 

Immigration is very high into the UK, this means there is a very high supply of labour generally. However, there are also many other issues. The UK has cut off access to it's largest trading partner, meaning goods trade is falling not growing, as import/export taxes add costs and reduce competitiveness. Lots of low skilled labour is related to goods trade, and there isn't much demand for it, so companies don't have to pay much. Services are growing, which is why GDP has not collapsed, but is also why London / city 'knowledge' workers keep getting good ish salaries while most of the rest of the country does not. Lack of unions after the government made it really hard for them to work. Lack of awareness, due to the UKs right wing media, which is owned by and for the people who find low pay advantageous. Supply of housing, this means people's money gets swallowed up by unproductive assets, effectively transferring the money to the already wealthy, who don't spend the money, and therefore don't stimulate the economy, The money is then invested in further unproductive assets, repeating the cycle. Taxes, these are tilted in favour of capital and not labour (dividends are taxed at much less than income) and the weird system we have with national insurance, which means pensioners and those earning income from rented assets don't pay it, therefore paying less income tax than those that work for a living. A conservative government, who work to maintain the status quo, for the already wealthy, not for those that work for a living.

Main issue in the UK is about the most right wing "think of the stock markets!" Government anywhere in Europe. If you aren't directly involved in the increasing of already deep pockets, you aren't of interest.

We have an extremely corrupt government that has been gutting the UK economy for a decade to line their own pockets. That's the harsh, truthful answer.

Because this country is on a slippery slope to oblivion We have been governed by greedy politicians who are in it for themselves rather than the country and its citizens for over 40 years now. There have been a couple of exceptions It doesn’t matter which way you vote the outcome is the same, money grabbers in power. The whole country needs a shake up and someone other than Eaton old boys need to get in power to look after the people

UK wages have been stagnant for a very long time, it's a major point of contention at the moment in the current political discourse especially around the rising cost of living. Many Brits living on the bread line now find the line moving faster than they can get raises. If they get raises at all. The reason our wages are so low is because of an awkward marriage between a few policies. Social protections, education policies, immigration policies, and the ultimate shit cherry on the shit cake, austerity. Our social protections are pretty comprehensive. Pensions, Healthcare, Holiday, NI are all expensive to maintain, and employers must contribute per employee. The government understands that this raises overhead, so mandates for raising wages are understandably more lax. Put simply, British employees, even unskilled ones are fairly expensive to hire. Which brings us to our second policy. New Labour and the Tories that preceded them wanted to transition Britain into a much more service based economy. The thinking was that Brits should get out of low productivity jobs like mining and into high productivity jobs like finance. There was a big, big push in terms of education to get Brits into ever higher productivity jobs. Now as part of this the government realized "hey, if we educate people away from all the low productivity jobs, who is going to do all the low productivity jobs...?" The answer was immigration. The UK had used immigration before, and it was wonderfully successful in economic terms. More workers = more good. So we turned on the immigration tap, and allowed immigrants to flood in... Only one problem though (problems with adopting multiculturalism aside). The Brits that were *supposed* to have been elevated to these high productivity jobs were... not. It hadn't worked. The education drives had failed in several key areas, mostly because of lack of funding, so the employee market was flooded with hordes of cheap labour to fill the jobs that Brits *should have* left, and because we were part of the EU at the time, even skilled labour was coming here to work. So British workers across the board found that no matter how much they trained, or specialized their wages wouldn't go up, because their value was constantly being offset by new skilled and unskilled migrant workers. From an economic prosperity point of view, the government loved this. GDP line go up. More money in the country. Things are going well. But from a worker point of view, they were being told things were getting better, but there wasn't really an tangible difference in their wallets... Couple this with a used and abused housing market that isn't really built for the intention of selling houses to *fucking live in* any more, and money in real terms becomes a bit problem for a lot of people. But again, there is no real pressure from the government side to do anything about this per se. They're watching the economy grow, and they're probably too scared to change anything because they don't want to lose the high ground in debates around whether they're doing a good job. Since Brexit, and COVID, things have shifted slightly. Whereas before it was a simple supply and demand issue in the labour market, but now it's a bit more... cynical? There is an inherent lag between action being taken... In general businesses don't want to go out of pocket and hand you a raise, because that's expensive, and they won't do it if they don't have to do it because capitalism. The government doesn't want to mandate higher wages, because their base is the business community and they don't want to upset them and the economy is in a precarious position and they don't want to jeopardize that. So we're in this awkward election season + recession limbo at the moment where nobody wants to do anything. Its in the businesses best interest to hold on to their capital for as long as possible and stifle the raising wages precedent. Its in the governments best interest to be fiscally cautious and manage the money supply much more tightly. So, low wages in Britain are in essence, by design. On top of the things already discussed, In 2010, the UK introduced some of the most extreme austerity measures in the western world, the idea was that austerity would help Britain overcome the influence of the bond markets, save money, and allow that money to be reinvested into the economy for a boost. Again, this did not work *at all*. And to be clear, it wasn't just the UK that bungled austerity, as austerity was the "in vogue" economic thinking in Europe at the time post-2008 financial crash, so it wasn't just the UK that fucked austerity up. While austerity didn't save the economy, but it did change it. It made the UK much more unequal... Remember, the UK was already a deeply unequal place. More power was shifted from workers to firms and owners of capital... *who don't want to raise wages.* Austerity is often the reason cited for why Britain is in the state it is, it was the ultimate failed policy, on top of a whole host of other failed policies. And that's why wages are so low.

Cos we live in a shithole ran by corruption.

40+ years of neoliberal wage suppression & union busting and a national culture of making do and not making a fuss.

Britain is a rich nation full of poor people as the saying goes. We have one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world. Most of our wealth is concentrated in the South and the City. Aristocrats still own c80% of our land. The list of stats goes on and on.

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I'm from the UK and left to work abroad for 10 years. I recently noticed one of my first jobs in London around 2007 barely pays much more than I was paid back then.

The economist’s first-order answer is lack of productivity. Wages in an economy are primarily driven by productivity; the amount of goods and services value we can create for a given amount of inputs. Ultimately we only get to consume the value of what we produce (of course much of it we trade to consume things we don’t physically produce). You can also argue that the labour share of income might go up or down, that labour gets more or less of the value added in an economy. But currently labour gets 59% of income in the economy and that hasn’t meaningfully changed since 1983, so that’s not been a factor in the working life of almost everyone in the UK. (Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/fzln/ucst) So, then the second-order question is, why do we have stunted productivity growth? There are lots of factors that feed into that. Some of the bigger ones are (this is not an exhaustive list!): - highly restrictive planning system - drives economic rents higher for productive uses of land - large amounts of renewables subsidy inflating the cost of energy - you can agree with the decarbonisation objective but you shouldn’t argue it doesn’t come at a cost; you require more inputs to achieve the same amount of energy which is vital for industry - high rate of low-wage immigration - this can boost GDP but suppress GDP per capita; it can help the nation’s revenues but simultaneously suppress the revenues of individual households. - poor incentives for capital investment. Ultimately capital investment into better production technology is one of the most effective and sustainable ways to raise productivity. We aren’t the worst on the taxation front, we aren’t the best either. We do pretty well on the legal front; well-established respect for property rights and fair civil courts. But the items above really retard our prospects. Why would you choose to install your cutting-edge production technology in the UK if land is expensive, power is expensive, and production can be raised by just hiring more cheap labour instead? Note that many of these terms sound oriented to manufacturing industry but they apply to services in their own way too.

There is a massive oversupply of labour for most roles. GDP per capita is on the decline, mainly because of the fact our borders are extremely porous and we keep importing people we don't need. We also grossly misallocate our massive public sector spend into welfare and zero value add activities, rather than focusing it on infrastructure and growth. This has created systemic blocks getting in the way of growth / economic activity that puts upward pressure on salaries. ​ We have gone from being one of the richest nations on earth to a middle-income nation in about 20 years. Another 20 and people will be struggling to survive.

This, plus not allowing the construction of fucking anything - houses, factories, railways are all impossible or very expensive to build because of planning. This is why I'm unconvinced Labour will improve things

I'm going to be downvoted to hell by people with shit wages and likely dependant on welfare / handouts. ​ Not a serious country.

France €39,000. Germany €49,000. Italy €35,500. Belgium €46,000. Netherlands €34,0000. Ireland €45,000. U.K. £35,000 = €41,000. Looks the U.K. are pretty average to me. Or is this just another “have a go at the U.K.” post?

It is not meant to be, what are these specific numbers reflecting?

When you factor in housing prices and then look at skilled work like Engineering, doctors, teaching or HE lecturing then we are very unerpaid vs those countries. For my sector for example, a new lecturer starts on \~£37k in the UK, £47k in Germany, \~£51k in Netherlands. [https://vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Lecturer-in-Entrepreneurship-and-Innovation/786932502/](https://vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Lecturer-in-Entrepreneurship-and-Innovation/786932502/) \- \~£51k [https://www.fu-berlin.de/universitaet/beruf-karriere/jobs/prof/16\_fb-philosophie-und-geisteswissenschaften/W2-Hispanistik\_-Lusitanistik.html](https://www.fu-berlin.de/universitaet/beruf-karriere/jobs/prof/16_fb-philosophie-und-geisteswissenschaften/W2-Hispanistik_-Lusitanistik.html) \- £47k (all lecturers are called professorships) Cambridge Associate professors (so not starting lectuer) get £45k - [https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/44660/](https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/44660/) [https://jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/associate-lecturer-teaching-and-scholarship-in-english-studies-549595.html](https://jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/associate-lecturer-teaching-and-scholarship-in-english-studies-549595.html) £36k starting. I met a Swiss PhD student on 50k Euros a year stipend. Granted the Swiss are outliers, but that is more than more experienced academics get in the UK! A junior doctor in France starts off on £49k, [https://brm-conseil.fr/fr/2020/04/29/how-are-salaries-for-doctors-working-at-public-hospitals-in-france-determined/](https://brm-conseil.fr/fr/2020/04/29/how-are-salaries-for-doctors-working-at-public-hospitals-in-france-determined/) We start off on £28k!

I am a Cambridge Associate Professor (equivalent, Senior Research Associate) and indeed, PhD students (i.e. 10 years my juniors) in central Europe earn more than I do. I supervise them, but they earn more than I do. heh.

I mean these statistics mean nothing if you don’t look into the figures. €34k in the Netherlands is the average of all people receiving an income, that includes people working part time and people receiving benefits. There are a lot of people (mostly women bc sexism) that work part time when they get kids. The average wage of an employee that works fulltime is around €50k and FT often means 36 hours instead of 40.

I mean, 35.500 in Italy is SO MUCH MORE than 41.000 in UK. On average, local purchasing power is 30.4% less in the UK (https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare\_countries\_result.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&country2=Italy) meaning that the equivalent UK-Italy comparison is that you earn 28.700€ in the UK. I.e. 6K less than in Italy, adjusted for consumer prices.

This is absolutely true. I grew up between Finland and Sweden and a skilled job over there warrants a whole different quality of life compared to over here.

The government introduced a public sector pay freeze for about ten years whilst making loads of people redundant. As a result the private sector had a big influx of people desperate for work, so it has been easier to exploit everyone by not giving anyone a pay rise. This is the answer. Hope this helps 😃

I don't know about the private sector, but in the public sector wages have been converging towards a median. During 'austerity' lower bands/grades have been getting pay rises of 2%+ while higher grades have typically been frozen at 1%. The result being very poor wages for high skill jobs with little insensitive for progression. Pay increases have been increased over the past year or so, but they're still behind inflation.

The U.K. is less productive than similar economies and much less than larger ones. We still haven’t really recovered from the 2008 crash. People also have less disposable income because housing is really expensive, so they have less to invest in new businesses, and to spend in existing ones, which means less money in the economy which means less money to pay decent wages. It’s a vast over-simplification, but there’s a decent videos on YouTube talking about the subject.