Cutting Red Tape on Business

[miss_s_b]

You know what I am really sick of? Small business leaders appearing as talking heads on news programmes saying that employment law is tooooo complicated and it's not fair and stamping their feet like Kevin the teenager. I have some proposals for nice simple easy to understand employment regulations:

• Minimum wage is a nice round ten pounds per hour


• Every worker who has a doctor's note proving they are ill is entitled to full pay until the doctor deems them fit to return to work.


• All workforces to be unionised, and any employers found employing non-union workers will be subject to prosecution*

All of these are a lot simpler and easier to understand than current employment regulations, and all of them would elicit howls of outrage from so-called small business leaders. You know why? Because when small business leaders says this measure is too complicated what they actually mean is this measure might cost us money. Well, you know what? If you can't afford to pay your workers a living wage and treat them like human being then maybe you might want to face the fact that your business doesn't deserve to survive.

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* this is not an idea I would support, at least not unless unions become a lot freer and totally divorced from the Labour party, but you've got to admit, it's simple.

Comments

[gwenhwyfaer]

Might I suggest as an alternative to that last one "All the workers in a workplace form a de facto union of their own, which must be recognised, unless they opt out or join another one"?

[miss_s_b]

That'd work, yes, except in tiny businesses it might be more effective for the workers to join an existing union.

[telegramsam]

10 pounds... that's like 15 bucks?!? Good luck.

(I made a bit less than that when I started working for the state after I graduated from UGA. Most people I know who are my age make rather less than that)

[miss_s_b]

For reference, current rate for minimum wage in the UK is 6.08 (US$9.59).

The "living wage", i.e. the minimum that a person can be expected to live on, is 7.20 (US$11.35) outside London, more inside London.

For further comparison, Norway doesn't have a legal minimum wage, because they have such strong Labour unions, but the lowest wage I have seen reported is 133 Norwegian Krone per hour, which is 14.13 in UK money or US$22.28

However, the cost of living in Norway is more than the UK, and the UK is more than the US. We pay around four times what you do for petrol, for example. And most products which are available in the UK and the US usually just have the $ changed to a pound sign, but the numbers stay the same, so even though minimum wage in the UK is much higher than the US, the only thing that makes our poor people better off than yours after housing and utilities and food is the NHS.

[telegramsam]

Hm, I suppose so. Cost of living varies around the United States drastically though. New York or San Francisco, for example, are not cheap places to live.

And if you live in a rural area, you are going to be burning up a LOT more fuel to get *anywhere*, I know where I grew up on the border of Georgia & Tennessee, even the stupid Wal-Mart was a good 30 minute drive away, in each direction. If you needed something particular, you might have to go down at least to Marietta, which was about an hour and a half away, or all the way into Atlanta.

I dunno, it's very expensive to be poor, no matter where you live. This is not a competition I'd like to win, anyway...

[miss_s_b]

Oh, I have no argument with your last paragraph at all.

We are poor enough not to be able to afford to own a car, so rural living is not even an option we can consider.

[telegramsam]

Unfortunately for many rural poor, moving anywhere period is not an option. I knew a lot of people who basically spent all their time scrounging for gas money or bumming rides off people because that's the only way they could get around.

I dunno, distance is a particular issue in much of the United States. I don't know if it is in parts of the UK, I assume rural areas have the same problems everywhere, but moving isn't always an option no matter where you are or where you'd like to go. The ability to just up and move is definitely a privilege that requires certain resources (money, for starters, and if you are dependent on your family or some other care-giver for whatever reason, it may not be possible).

It's sort of an American thing in particular to just expect folks to rip up stakes and move to greener pastures if things get bad where they are, but it's really an unfair attitude for a host of reasons. One of the more unsypathetic bits of American culture, anyway...

[miss_s_b]

I think the US was just built around having transport available; the UK was built for walking because cars weren't invented and only rich people had horses.

Also, my impression is that Americans have huge houses with lots of stuff in; space is very much at a premium here, so we have smaller houses and thus moving is probably easier (I know this from when I had USian visitors a few years back, both of whom were not rich, and both of whom kept making comments about how we all lived squished up together here, and aren't our houses cute - the house I was living in at the time was one that most Brits would consider quite large).

[telegramsam]

That also depends on where you are and who you are. In cities, especially older ones in the Northeast, homes can be quite small.

I think the craze for massive houses also was a fad that is (thankfully) dying back a bit. You look at the homes that were built immediately after WWII, most of them are 900-1400 square feet, maybe 2 or three smallish bedrooms. Not tiny but not huge either, and whole families with 3 or 5 kids lived in them just fine without killing each other. Generally the children shared rooms, boys in one and girls in the other. It was that way when my mother was growing up, her brothers shared one room and she & her sister shared another, including sharing 1 bed. She was so happy when she finished school & moved out, one of the first things she did was save up and get a condo so she could live on her own.

These days that's less common because those who can afford to move out to the suburbs where land is cheaper can build their ridiculous McMansions, but still I've been in homes where everyone was "squished in" and amongst the working poor, that is not at all unusual. You'll have families renting very small, older properties such as I described. It's really only those with the money to rent or purchase newer homes that have the luxury of room. One of the things the group I work in does is home investigations for children with lead poisoning, and most of them are living in these older rental homes (lead-based paint was banned for residential use in 1978 here, but old deteriorating paint is still present in a lot of pre-1978 housing, which is how most American children with lead poisoning get exposed to it in the first place. I don't do most of these but I have the training and have done a few in the past, and I've seen the assessment reports from my co-workers' cases - you'd be surprised at some of the housing in this country).

The "huge houses with lots of stuff in" is only one part of the picture, though I can see how one might get that impression. It's not generally the lowest income brackets living in such luxurious accommodations though.

[miss_s_b]

I think the age of the buildings is maybe another factor - any house built after WWII is considered new around here. The house I live in now is 1870s, and that's about average - so any new fashion for different sizes/shapes of houses takes a long time to work through. A lot of houses the age of mine have been split into flats, though.

[telegramsam]

Hmmm that would make sense. Most of the single-family housing in this country was built during the post-WWII boom, at least outside the cities. I think the oldest still-existing residential house in this area was built around 1790 and it's a dilapidated thing that hasn't been inhabited since the last owner died and deeded it over to the state years ago (who haven't done anything with it, unfortunately). I think I posted photos of it last year, actually. 1790 isn't that old for the UK/Europe but it's a tad unusual here. (Pre-Civil War buildings are rare in the Southeast for obvious reasons).

There's been more of a push to preserve older buildings in recent decades but a LOT of stuff got bulldozed everywhere for newer development, also.

[miss_s_b]

Where I am, in Yorkshire, most of the building boom was industrial revolution, so 1800 onwards. Where Mat is from, in Devon, the big building time was late 1600s...

Don't you guys have a lot of wooden houses? We don't have any of those, but I heard (this might be totally wrong) that you lot have more wooden houses because of earthquakes and things.

[telegramsam]

Most houses are constructed from either wood frame or brick. I think mostly because it was relatively cheap to do wood, brick is more expensive. Recent homes have drywall/gypsum board on the interior but plaster & lathe is more common in homes 40-50+ years old. You get typical tarpaper and shingle roofs, as well as molded tin roofs which have become more popular since they're cheaper, last longer and no longer look like barn roofs as they've gotten quite clever with some of the designs.

Houses older than 20-30 years often have asbestos siding on them, which is something else to look out for in addition to the lead-based paint (sometimes the plaster in the interior also, and those blasted 'popcorn' textured ceilings, you've really got to be careful what you go hacking into if you're a DIY type person. This may also be true in the UK, I don't know. You might want to talk to some people who know about that sort of thing if you want to go drilling through walls, asbestos was used in just about every damn thing from the 1800's up through the 70's and is still found in a few things like roofing materials). Vinyl siding is more common on recent stuff, or stucco in some areas (out west especially, also Florida.)

There are certain areas prone to earthquakes (Los Angeles is one obvious example) where you would never build anything out of brick (which doesn't tolerate much shaking at all before collapse). Recently built homes are made out of all sorts of materials. Wood or composite materials, I don't know a great deal about it, but the technology has changed of course.

My mother's house which was built in the late 1920's is brick, but she's in north Georgia. There are a few cracks in the foundation from mild earthquakes (the sort you might mistake for a big truck passing by) which occur along old, dead faults related to the Appalachians and related features, but it's not an area particularly prone to them, although they can occasionally produce a big one.

It really kind of varies from region to region, so it's hard to say anything without thinking of a hundred exceptions. A lot of people back in the day would build their own homes, also, and some funny stuff occasionally got done. You just never really know until you get into a place and really give it a look-over...

[miss_s_b]

The government paid for everyone to get rid of asbestos when I was a kid, so there are VERY few places with it in. ETA: OK, this was apparently a faulty memory, but I recall a man coming round to our house to remove some after my mum saw an advert for it in the 80s at some point. There's a government website: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/homeandcommunity/planning/doingworkyourself/dg_10022562

New houses sometimes have drywall, but the house I am in is stone, with double skin stone outer walls and single skin stone inner walls, with plaster skimmed over the stone. This is normal AFAIK. Of course, we live in a stone-rich area. If you go to (for example) Manchester, everything is red brick.

Ceilings with texture here tend to be artex, and it's horrible stuff, it's like plaster mixed with glue. Hacking it off is very satisfying, but it makes a right mess of both the floor when it drops and the ceiling you hack it off. It's easier to just skim plaster over it and have a slightly lower ceiling, if the beams will take the weight...

I get low level psychological disturbance if there aren't enough stone buildings (or enough hills - even though I loved living in Hull it was driving me slowly mad because it was too flat).

[telegramsam]

LOL I understand the hills thing... I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians and still get twitchy if I have to go to the coast or some horrific place like north Texas where it's too flat. It just seems... unnatural.

There's plenty of stone around the USA but it's still more expensive to cut and transport than to use wood or brick so you just don't see it that often, except maybe in public buildings or churches.

(Of course this whole discussion hasn't broached the topic of mobile homes, and that's a whole 'nother rant. Trailer parks are the sole purview of the poor, pretty much. :\)