Ireland: Musing on Minimum Wage

In moving here, and seeking to be employed in something that is outside of my professional training, I, currently, am scrambling for minimum wage jobs.

Today was my first official day working at a local castle that's been turned into a hotel. Wow. I had forgotten how inhospitable hospitality is to your feet. It is such a beautiful building to work in! Grand colleagues all. Rather somber though, but it is a serious kind of a destination.

As with most hospitality businesses, they pay minimum wage to their staff. Fine, I understand why a business needs to be profitable, otherwise no one has a job etc etc, however, if you are going to pay your staff minimum wage, then know that instead of an economic price, you will pay a social price.

One cost of this is turnover - staff have zero loyalty to a combination of holier-than-thou management and also a wage that means their quality of living is less than zero. In a country where the minimum wage is E 9.80, so for working 40 hours a week you make E 380-390 in hand, or E 1554 a month, assuming that you consistently get 40 hours, of which there is no guarantee. The average rent in Dublin is E 1600 per month.

I am reasonably easy to incite to anger, I understand that, but surely that maths right there is problematic. You have no hope of working full time and paying rent to live by yourself, letalone for anything else, so automatically, you're relegating a percentage of the population to sharing accommodation, and all the vagaries that come with that.

So if a living wage is E11.90 an hour, let's do the same maths
40 hour work week: 476
Monthly: 2 062
Yearly: 24 752
Net income after tax: 1 788 a month.

So if you were a single person who is just trying to live in a one bedroom apartment by yourself, that is probably going to be tight, even at living wage, assuming you have consistent hours, and are able to keep your job and fun things like that.

Income: 1 788
Rent 1 450
Mobile 20
Internet 25
Power 98

This leaves you with 195 to spend on all of your other food, medical, and fun expenses a month.

The biggest outgoing out of anyone's paycheck will certainly be rent. Ours is E1450, and that is 'cheap'. We looked at around 12 properties before we found one that we thought that worth the sizable investment that we were being asked to make - well over 50% of our final paycheck will be spent each and every month on rent.

The cheapest broadband each month was $25 a month, then goes up after 6 months - not that your salary does - to $45 a month.

Mobile phone needed for every job ever and most applications - minimum E 10 a month, 30 if you want to be able to text/call/use data

You'll probably need some power. We haven't had to pay a power bill yet so I don't know how much that is but if you refer to the average for a 1-2 bed apartment, it's around E100.

So yes, assuming that you are not shackled with debt, and aren't planning to do copious amounts of spending, you can exist while working full time on living wage.

But let's do those figures again, but on Minimum Wage.

Minimum wage is E9.80 an hour.
If you're lucky enough to get full time hours, and consistent hours then you can expect
40 hours: 392
Monthly: 1 698
Annually: 20 384
Net income after tax: 18 655 annually
Monthly: 1 555

All your bills are still the same price, though.

Income 1555
Rent 1450
Mobile 20
Internet 25
Power 98

Left with E-38 a month, so you're then forced to be looking for extra hours for food, or to be sharing an apartment. Certainly if one was a single adult supporting themselves, this would be alright, maybe. But when you're a single mother, or even with two incomes like this trying to support any version of children

Cheapest 'apartment' on Daft is currently E880 a month, this is sharing with 3 other people. So then you might be able to eat, and share other bills. There are some cheaper options than that, but then you start getting into some seriously tiny spaces, or sharing with some sometimes quite questionable people.

Perks of being poor?

No wonder there is a young person homeless on every street corner in town. The economics of poverty, and presumably disconnection here are very severe.

What are the consequences of this though? This is becoming true of nearly every Western culture, certainly in NZ and Australia, and I believe in the UK also. If the lower/middle class's spending power is completely eviscerated by giving it all to landed gentry every month, then were will that leave us? Who will buy all the books on Amazon and all the iphones if everyone is spending all their money on rent/bills?

Example from Australia

I believe we're getting closer and closer to a social revolution. Right now, people are just doing their darnedest to get by, but much more and there will be a tipping point.

Is our idea of what is considered poverty quite modern and warped though? Did poverty use to be much worse? Is poverty in fact living with out internet or a phone?

US Example

Maybe it was just CEOs that were poorer, as they've certainly been doing a very good job of changing this.

Another US example

If we were to introduce something like a Universal Basic Income, would this alleviate this, or would it simply push up the price of rent even further?

How is 'market rent' established anyway - isn't it just a collection of 'yea, wow that's steep, but I guess I'll pay that because somewhere to live is better than nowhere to live'? And if everyone does that then that's how landlords get away with 8% rent increases each year. Is this one of those instances where we need to collectively start saying no? Or will we then all just end up homeless?

I think corporate greed will be the undoing of us all unless it is severely legislated against. If only we had some pithy lawmakers that weren't completely falling all over themselves to help CEOs of big companies be complete overlords of their little serfdoms.

If you have a fix, I'd love to hear it.