“I remember when I realised I was earning just more than minimum wage despite gaining a high 2:1 degree from a reputable university,” says Tara, a 24-year-old marketing executive who graduated from Southampton University last year. “I try not to focus on it because of how frustrated I get.” Sam, who studied law at a Russell Group university and now works in government on £28,000 a year, has similar gripes: “I expected I’d be earning more.”
What rankles Tara, Sam and many others in a similar position is not just being squeezed by stagnant wage growth, high inflation and heavy student debts, but that they’re barely earning more than the mandatory minimum.
This is what a society with little inequality is. Everyone making around the same sort of wage. That’s actually the point, the end goal, for some.
Of course, the righteous, the elect, they’ll enjoy more but it won’t be classed as income. A bigger council house in hte right area, special food deliveries, Zil lanes for the Commissars.
Is anyone else curious to know what job Sam, assuming he or she actually obtained their law degree, is doing “in government” for just £28k p.a.?
Something really doesn’t sound right there. Sam’s comment later in the article that the job is particularly demanding and involves lots of unpaid overtime only adds to my scepticism.
An “executive” one year after graduation. In whatever “marketing” is?
A Russell-group law graduate working for local government?
All complaining that they are £150k or more behind their straight to work peers, and barely above the “fries with that” career path, because the minimum wage has been rocketing up so quickly.
Marketing executive is a standard job title for someone cold-calling businesses to try and sell them mobile phone services and the like. It is nearly always carried out from home and heavily dependent on commission.
It’s also the problem that there are plenty of people who want to be lawyers and marketing executives, especially middle class women. Middle class women rarely want to go work on oil rigs, in manufacturing, in retail, plumbing, writing software. They want nice polite office jobs. The sort of polite places where they can dress up, hang out and gossip with other women, do something 9-5 that isn’t too stressful and maybe meet some hot successful men. Law, HR, marketing, PR, journalism.
So wages in these fields have taken a dive, relatively, over 20 years because there’s a glut of people in them.
So £28K a year is what an unsucessful freshly-minted saleswxmxn earns, the successful ones presumably earn somewhat more and the very successful ones multiples thereof?
John,
“Marketing executive is a standard job title for someone cold-calling businesses to try and sell them mobile phone services and the like. It is nearly always carried out from home and heavily dependent on commission.”
No, that’s “sales executive”. Marketing executive is really marketing administrator. It’s a fairly basic office job, that happens to be in the marketing department.
Also what is a “high 2:1”? Do people put their weighted average final result on their CV now?
A 2:1 is a 2:1 is a 2:1. My 2:1 (which I know, but the public does not, was barely scraped) from the time my Alma dished out 70% Desmonds and under is apparently worth as much as one now despite it being 90% of degrees.
WB,
Yep.
I’m often in the shit at home for pointing out that as a general rule men go to work to earn money and provide for their families, women go to work to be “fulfilled”. Men will take any job if necessary while women will seek the perfect job.
It’s all the Boomers and Gen-Xers fault.
It’s irrelevant what you earn, it’s what you’re paid that matters. And the whole point of a minimum wage is to force employers to pay a base amount *regardless* of what the employees earn.
It’s definitely the case that graduate/middle-class salaries have stagnated while the minimum wage has pulled ‘low-income’ jobs closer. My first graduate job as a lab tech paid around £18K 20 years ago. Two career changes later, and I’m earning less now when you adjust for inflation (not that I’m complaining, I love my current job and I have enough to get by on)
From the article, the list of the lowest salaries shows “Geography £24,292”. Lower down the article in the list of the highest salaries we have “Geography, earth and environmental sciences £54,800”
So that extra “earth and environmental sciences” grift is worth an additional £30k per year. No wonder it’s a popular pastime.
It also makes one wonder about Geography students in general. How dumb do they need to be not to “big up” any tenuous “earth and environmental science” bits from their education and more than double their salary in the process?
There are far too many graduates often qualified for nothing very much, knowing even less but saddled with a sense that the world owes them a princely living.
Hmmm.. To me the key in those tables in in microbiology and biomedical science being so low.
Those are not uni graduate research jobs.
They’re lab assistant jobs that require someone only slightly more intelligent than a trained monkey. Especially since a lot of the standard diagnostic procedures are automated nowadays.
Trade School/bottom end of Polytech level.
Then again.. About any “educational” institution in the Uk can dub itself “College” or even “University” now.. With an ordinary diploma a Degree.
So quelle surprise, quelle horreur. Chickens , roost…
If you go into a generic starter job for any degree like marketing admin or go into government, worse local government, why expect to be paid anything other than generic starter job?
Government pay is very poor for even for the specialist professions within it and thats all public. A lot of which has been the generalist unions effectively cutting them out of salary negotiations and having less access to grade or pay escalation. It used to be a bit better for junior specialist until SCS now its worse. Hell in many specialisms you need higher qualifications just to start at the same grade.
In a country of so many degrees make it count…
John – junior lawyers these days are now pretty much indistinguishable from paralegals, and they earn like paralegals*
It’s a massively oversubscribed industry full of marriageable young women, so…
*Rare exceptions in London natch but you also have to work 100 hours a week for the foreseeable and might as well buy a lotto ticket instead if you’re white and working class.
Otoh, if you like talking to people and are curious about technology, you can earn £100K+ in your 20’s with no qualifications selling IT to businesses. The washout/burnout rate is also very high tho, and you also have to work your arse off basically forever. There’s no free lunches even when the client pays. But at least you’re not doing something shameful like being a solicitor. And seeing £20K commission payments go into your bank account soothes the pain of it all somewhat.
But I advise young people to learn valuable physical skills that can’t be easily automated, offshored or done by immigrants. Carpentry, plumbing and electricians will always be needed. Sales is for the kind of people who in previous centuries would have willingly joined a pirate crew.
“Carpentry, plumbing and electricians will always be needed”
With the wonderful Suckier Starmer five-year plan those trades will be required for infrastrucure projects, useless renewables, 1.5 million houses and still everybody’s kitchen extension and such. Triple over-subscribed by my guess. No AI is going to come along to replace those trades. If you get such a qualification you are made, money-wise, for some time to come. You WILL have to do actual work though, so there’s that.
Rhoda – the other great thing about trades is the most beautiful three words in the English language:
Cash in hand.
A “high 2:1 degree”?
Gosh!
No, sorry, not Gosh. Fuck off.
The UK is a low wage economy. Only 4% of people earn £100k or more. The average wage is £34k, so the girl earning £28k is actually doing well.
This is where we’ve ended up after nearly 30 years of Blairism ie high immigration, high benefits, big government, high regulation. Swiss costs, Bulgarian living standards and Nigerian roads.
The poor, bright, university-educated sausages have failed to realise that they’re on starter salaries. The clue is in the name. Once they’ve learned how to do their jobs in the real world and actually be productive they have prospects for career and income advancement, unlike the unskilled in minimum wage jobs who are going nowhere.
Whether that career advancement eventually recovers them their £150K student debt is another matter, but at least they had three years at “Uni” to have blue hair and be “gender-curious”, and they both now work in cosy circumstances where they still can. No hairy-arsed manual work for them.
“junior lawyers these days … a massively oversubscribed industry” Adam Smith wrote about this so it’s hardly new.
A Yank, however, has recently recycled Smith’s point, entitling it “elite overproduction”, and received roars of applause for it. Which just goes to show how many American “scholars” haven’t read Wealth of Nations.
(In my view the general education that everyone needs can be had by reading (i) a couple of Shakespeare’s tragedies, (ii) Wealth of Nations, (iii) Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and (iv) Darwin’s Origin of Species. Numbers (ii) – (iv) are, or used to be, available in excellent paperback abridgements from the Pelican Press.)
At the large commercial law firm where I work, new trainee lawyers are paid 30k in Scotland, 50k in London and on qualification 2 years later, 65k and 100k with increases annually thereafter. So lower than the US and Magic Circle firms, but we’re a tier below them, with decent hours of working. But entry is VERY competitive, even if not as bad as the top tier firms.
Norman @ 12.30, as with the Junior Doctors – it’s an apprenticeship, and when they’ve learned how to not kill people on a regular basis they’ll be getting up towards those six figure salaries if they’re smart enough.
But that doesn’t count, it’s all about now and “I do X hours and only get paid £28000”.
All complaining that they are £150k or more behind their straight to work peers
But hasn’t this always been true? I was streets ahead on earnings than my university educated peers when they got their first jobs. And I’ve little doubt I’ve stayed streets ahead of most of them, throughout our respective careers. University maybe a monetary advantage in some careers. But mostly, if you can cut it you can cut it. One way or the other. Monetarily, the real advantage of a university education is it allows the low performers to do better than they otherwise would. Or at least it did do until credentialisation took over. Now that’s just a hamper to the otherwise high performers. Apparently now, shitheads rule. You just have to look at the country & your government.
Curiously, this takes us right make to the creation of the medieval universities. They were for shitheads of the family. The ones who couldn’t cut it so went into the church.
This is a classic case of government thinking it can direct the economy, that it knows where things are going:-
“He said Ms Rayner believed that blocking similar developments would have “significant negative consequences for the UK digital economy”.
Labour has made building data centres a priority to boost Britain’s economy, earmarking server farms as “critical national infrastructure” to speed up decisions.”
I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s a good thing, but they’re selecting the exceptions, based on their experience of being a fishwife and a bloke who has worked in charities for years. But probably got into all this AI bullshit going on.
For most applications, it really doesn’t matter if a data centre is in Ireland, UK, Netherlands or Germany. The extra latency is largely irrelevant. It’s useful for certain types of things like video conferencing, or if you’re moving giant amounts of data around, but it’s a rather small percentage improvement, even then.
Letting people burn down the listed buildings they don’t want and build something new on them would probably do more for the economy.
DM – In my view the general education that everyone needs can be had by reading (i) a couple of Shakespeare’s tragedies
Yarp.
Also, the sum of all religion and mortality is found in the Lord’s Prayer.
But I’d add Treasure Island and Kidnapped to the syllabus. Young people, especially boys, benefit from a sense of adventure. It’s an antidote to the passivity and petty rules-following formal education tries to inculcate.
You strike me as a canny, couthy lad like Davy Balfour, dearieme. You’re not a whiggamore, I trust.
WB – For most applications, it really doesn’t matter if a data centre is in Ireland, UK, Netherlands or Germany. The extra latency is largely irrelevant
It matters for all those high bandwidth, ultra low latency 5G AI services they’re hoping you’ll consume. Self driving cars and whatnot.
– None of which will work when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, as we all know. It was all well-described “an inverted pyramid of piffle” by someone who then did his utmost to bring it about. Or rather, perhaps, his wife did by manipulating that tool of his in her pocket.
Addolff: « It’s an apprenticeship, and when they’ve learned how to not kill people on a regular basis they’ll be getting up towards those six figure salaries ».
Whereupon, they will be qualified to start killing people on a regular basis again.
Steve,
“It matters for all those high bandwidth, ultra low latency 5G AI services they’re hoping you’ll consume. Self driving cars and whatnot.”
Self-driving cars aren’t networked. Not that they actually work properly, anyway.
“You’re not a whiggamore, I trust.” A Galloway cowboy? Heavens forfend! Next county over.
“the sum of all religion and mortality is found in the Lord’s Prayer.”
There was an Archbish of C who offered as the summary of Christianity the ditty:
“Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the bible tells me so.”
I can’t remember which it was but he must, of necessity, have been a better man than the present absurd incumbent.
Come to think of it if general education ought to include a bit about Christianity I’d add Mark’s Gospel. You must, however, take a bottle of tippex and cover over the forged bits at the beginning and end. That’s “forged” in the sense of added later by someone who was not the original, unknown author. Some bibles draw your attention to the forged verses but I don’t know if all do.
Rhonda: Ah, it’s the *qualification* that kills it. I’ve got me City & Guides 236 Part 1 & 2, 16th Edition, Distinction, been electricianin’ since I was about 12 years old. But, no, you’ve got to have this year’s qualification and this year’s guild card. And the knees of an 18-year-old.
“And the knees of an 18-year-old.”
You must suggest that St Elon develop electric knees for leckies. Worth a Nobel, that would be.
jgh, I now little of electricianing but when I have had electricians in the house they spend half the time bemoaning the annual nonsense and the other half complaining about arbitrary changes of rules and standards which seem only designed to support the annual ritual. Am I right?
(My brother installs computer cabling. He was prevented from running his datac ables beside an electric power cable because the new rules won’t allow it, crosstalk or something. The data cables are fibre-optic.)
@WB
It’s networking self driving cars will make them viable. There really isn’t any advantage in them in them otherwise, except under certain conditions on major autoroutes. You’d still need someone supervising to take care of the unexpected they can’t cope with. You could get in situations where all self driving cars make the same decisions. And how do you get someone to concentrate on supervision when they don’t have the stimulant of making decisions?
A networked SD car should be safer because it’s (or rather the network’s) aware of what other vehicles are doing & it outperforms humans on concentration & reaction times. The “kid running out in the road” scenario is a bit of a red herring. How many kids get run over by human drivers don’t see them or don’t react quickly enough? How many accidents are caused by drivers taking evasive action of kid’s don’t run out in the road? SD cars mightn’t be 100% safe. But nor are humans. We witnessed a fatal recently. The result of two vehicles trying to occupy the same space. But the fatal was the result of the third vehicle ploughed into them & the fourth into that. Both due to inattention & travelling too close together.
jgh. Buy yourself some decent kneepads. I was doing this for decades without problems. And the plumbing/carpentry/etc side is far more demanding than sparking. It’s a girl’s occupation. Often the considerable force one is applying in the other trades is going through your knees.
And there’s a sort of general rule in life. If it’s uncomfortable it’s what you’re being paid for.
WB – El BiS is right, nota that autonomous vehicles and 5G gang thegither.
Dearieme – “Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the bible tells me so.”
Saw in the American news:
God’s truth is reaching new eyes, with Bibles reportedly flying off shelves this year.
In fact, Bible sales are up 22% this year through the end of October when compared to last year’s sales during the same time period, making for “a golden age of Bible publishing,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
This made me think of a “Paint Your Wagon” based sales pitch for some reason:
Gonna sell some Bibles
Gonna sell em well
If you ain’t buyin
Then you can go to Hell
AI generated Lee Marvin sings. We could sell dozens, Rodders.
BIS,
“You’d still need someone supervising to take care of the unexpected they can’t cope with.”
So how many of these people are there going to be per car to react quickly to unexpected situations? What happens if I’m half way up a hill in rural Wiltshire and it happens and it can’t connect?
Western Bloke – What happens if I’m half way up a hill in rural Wiltshire and it happens and it can’t connect?
Then KITT will take over and navigate the road for you.
But you will need to install a futuristic swishing red light on the front of your car that goes “whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo” so KITT can see.
@Steve
The flashing red light of the front of KITT isn’t a million miles from reality. Instead we have a LiDAR setup that does the seeing bit with non visible laser light.
The computer driving the car is the easy bit. The hard bit is understanding what the cameras and LiDAR (if it has it) are seeing, then deciding what action is needed to deal with it, hence some of the huge investments we are seeing in AI.
@BiS
A networked SD car should be safer because it’s (or rather the network’s) aware of what other vehicles are doing & it outperforms humans on concentration & reaction times.
True, but we’re talking about communication (maybe 5G maybe not) between neighbouring vehicles, not (as, I think, was WB) talking over the phone network to some remote server, which would involve far too much latency to be of any practical use. You make a very good logical point that SD doesn’t need to be perfect, just better than the average human (which isn’t setting the bar very high, given some of the driving round these parts!) But logic doesn’t work, people are much more forgiving of human error than machine error.
@Chris
I can’t see why latency should be a problem unless you’re talking about multiple seconds. A central control is doing routing & capacity management. It know’s roughly where every car is but not exactly. It doesn’t need to know at that resolution. Car to car dialogue could take care of local conflicts. You’re car will be aware of the position & vectors of cars around it. And then on local environments it’s sensor array will be telling it what the system isn’t. It’s complex but it’s not much different from current battle management. Except your target are helping you with the non-intercepts.
As for WB’s objection, I have the same objection. Why I’m not in favour of autonomous self driving cars.
SD car to server: “Does this look like a child?”
Server: “Yes, take avoiding action.”
SD car: “Too late!”