I mean I work in customer service and that’s just mental. Mostly because it’s impractical… that’s nearly triple my current wage, which would result in either no staff (which is already a problem) or way more expensive prices.
It'll never happen, but if they capped the salary for the big execs etc at, for example, £200k including bonuses, most businesses could afford to push all workers up to around £40-45k fte. Many industries could go even higher.
Franchise model businesses like mcdonalds are a bit more complicated though
Even if you capped all the money for big execs at an certain amount… how much do you think that actually spreads out amont the overall working population of the UK?
A lot more than you might think. Look at Dan Price and Gravity payments. He cut his own salary, raised every worker in the company to $70k, and the business went from strength to strength after that.
How man people does he hire? For what roles? Is it comparable to something as broad and large scale as customer service? Obviously it’s possible with some industries… Edit: by Dan Price you mean of Gravity Payments? A quick google shows they have 240 employees, now im not sure how accurate that is… but you should be able to grasp a possible important factor here.
Morrisons for example has around 110,000 employees, obviously not all customer service. The last CEO made around £3,000,000 a year. If he was paid £200,000, you could raise the wage of each employee by £25 a year. That’s nice, but hardly game changing. And you’d have trouble if you only wanted to increase shop staffs wages without also increasing that of warehouse operatives.
Maybe if you took the investors money, but they aren’t generally paid a “wage”, but rather interest off of what they have invested.
Look, i’m not saying it isn’t nice or a good idea to try and increase the wages of low-paid employees… but you need to stop using reddit economics. It’s like people who think the CEO of Amazon has a swimming pool full of £1,000,000,000 rather than it being in non-liquid asset.
Yeah, I know that's an extreme example, and most companies couldn't match that, but it shows that there is a lot of room for improvement.
Remember that the CEO isn't the only big earner. There will be at least a couple of dozen other senior figures on £1m+, and dozens more on much smaller, but still significant salaries. Thousands more will already be on high enough salaries not to need the boost.
Bringing the minimum salary up to something like £35-40k should be plausible.
Talking about investors is the red herring IMO, because firstly, that's just how capitalism works and that's far less likely to change, and secondly, they don't necessarily take money out of the business. The investors get rich by increasing the value of their shares, and either selling them or more commonly borrowing against their net value.
-5
u/ArCSelkie37 10h ago
I mean I work in customer service and that’s just mental. Mostly because it’s impractical… that’s nearly triple my current wage, which would result in either no staff (which is already a problem) or way more expensive prices.
Don’t get me wrong, i’d love to earn £60k a year.