Immigrants face £49k wage minimum to stay Officials checking immigrants' payslips to decide which skilled workers can settle in the UK may have to choose those with salaries of at least £49k. A new set of recommendations from the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) suggest that immigration authorities should take into account how much immigrants are paid when deciding …
@ Atonnis Perhaps....through training, educating, and contracting workers properly...?
So they can leave for more money?
@ Anonymous Coward Ok... ..how about employing UK staff?
Because they want too much money. Where is this going to come from with company accounts stretched to the limit paying for the more important things?
"Where is this going to come from with company accounts stretched to the limit paying for the more important things?"
Well, if IT staff is not that important to you, don't pay them that much. Pay what you believe is reasonable. Then when nobody wants the job, take a look at what your IT staff actually do and get it through your thick head that you get what you pay for.
"Because they want too much money. Where is this going to come from with company accounts stretched to the limit paying for the more important things?"
2 things:
1.By what percentage is your salary higher than that of your employees? (I mean real salary including dividends and expenses)
2.If you have a company that is struggling so hard to make enough money to employ people then is your company performing or failing?
If you think there are things more important than your staff salaries then you either have a business that doesn't need staff or you have a failure of priority.
As it happens salaries in the UK are dismally low compared with the cost of living. But I bet you weren't complaining when you cashed the cheques on the house you sold, got breaks on VAT or increased your cost to customer.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and beg for another lump of coal to put on the fire at Christmas.
What causes me bitter laughter is the last government's dual track policies of a) immigration, because immigration is good for business and brings in well educated specialists, and b) education, education, education. The former course of action swelled our population by some 7.27%; while the latter course of action was supposed to swell the number of professionals we have (remember the lead time is now definitely swallowed up by 14 or more years of edjcation, edjacation, edjcation) and still we have problems with shortages of professionals. The previous government either lied or did not know WTH it was doing to this country, though I'm not yet suggesting this one is necessarily an improvement.
Aside from anything else, this country is one of the most densely populated in an overpopulated world; it is not self sufficient in food and energy, and we have recently seen increases in water shortages, especially where rivers have run dry and farmers have not been able to use them for irrigation purposes.
Too many people. Too many idiot politicians.
@ adifferentbob
Slavery never mind Wilberforce ….. dammit a tear fell from my eye when the barbary pirates ceased trading
@ KrisMac Thank you …… git :) I was going to go onto highlight ‘the more important things for which company accounts were stretched to the limit’. But you have blown my cover, and nobody fell for that one …. Thoughts along those lines were cheesy nibbles (hey champagne is so boring without), executive motors, and so on.
@ CheesyTheClown ….. pause…. Sorry for the delay in the reply just booking my ticket for Oslo, please tell me there is a McDonalds local to the Airport?
@ AC 09:44 GMT ‘……..then start taxing offshore contracts as imports.’ Tell me it is so, please, they can have my vote every time, perhaps they could surcharge the foreign call centres, and cold calling phone calls at the same time.
‘…..about it, cleaning up that mess is what keeps me in work at £35-50 ph…’ Hmm yes you would think management would notice this one either in the first place, maybe by the 3rd or 4th time, but they don’t. Oh well. On the one hand it is annoying when your job goes off to sunnier shores, on the other is the cheery thought that in a couple years there is going to be twice as much work.
@ AC 09:45 GMT Answers 1. 0 % 2. performing or failing? …. Surviving just about
‘….more important than your staff salaries…..’ Can I suggest paper clips, the biscuits with that really solid chocolate topping, executive bidets?
‘….complaining when you cashed the cheques on the house you sold, got breaks on VAT or increased your cost to customer’ The house I haven’t got, VAT breaks would be nice, increase my cost to the customer mmmmmmmm (whoops gotta stop day dreaming)
‘….for another lump of coal….’ Get me some logs while you out and about.
£25 an hour is slave labor for any quality IT staff. I don't know what kind of IT staff you're hiring, but if you want cheap assed labor willing to work for what you're willing to pay, then I promise you that you'll need twice or thrice the number of IT workers which will cost you a hell of a lot more even if you're picking them out of soup kitchens.
Be more selective about who you hire and get less people who are more qualified and more dependable.
£25 an hour... wow... that's barely more than McDonalds pays for the guys flipping burgers here in Norway.
"Well over £25 per hour"? So you mean you'd be paying industry standard wages?
Sucks to you. well, sucks to be your employees anyway.
Avg of £250-£400 a day for IT workers depending on field.
That means standard for UK is £31.25-£50 per hour.
This is a great start but if the govt really wants to raise funds AND improve UK labour market then start taxing offshore contracts as imports.
But the big concern is employers that behave like this tend to end up employing untalented inexperienced staff, making up the short fall with contractors (who are contractors because they are fed up competing for work at low pay with bedroom pc users).
The end result is usually shoddy systems that can't perform basic tasks and have poorly thought out processes and user journeys. Actually, when I think about it, cleaning up that mess is what keeps me in work at £35-50 ph...
To a certain extent, that is missing the point. Employee usefulness is only part of what determines one's wage. If you happen to work in an industry which is not as profitable - your wage will be lower, even if you are useful or talented. I think that's what the poster above was hinting at - some industries which are more profitable (banks and financials among others) will be able to pay higher wages. That doesn't automatically mean that their contribution is more important to society then other industries which are not as cash flush as them.
But isn't that the point of the higher wage, so as to draw the useful worker towards the more profitable sector of the economy? Define for me "importance to society" outside of essential services? The tax dollars (or pounds) and incomes recirculated through the economy from high income financials have proved incredibly useful in providing the benefits (rightly or wrongly) to other parts of society. Manufacturing may be important, but someone has to buy the goods.
The tax dollars (or pounds) and incomes recirculated through the economy from high income financials have proved incredibly useful in providing the benefits (rightly or wrongly) to other parts of society. Manufacturing may be important, but someone has to buy the goods.
I thought it was the greed and abuse of privilage excersized by high income financials that got this whole mess started.
Capitalism is one giant pyramid scheme and is behaving entirely within the model. (think pension scheme?)
If you were in for the 80s and recruited new memebers then you're made, if you're in it now and trying to sell the product you're screwed.
So a CEO on $100m a year is like 3000 times more useful than the workers who work in his company? You really believe that there is anybody on this planet who is even 10 times more useful than someone else?
Pay has nothing anymore to do with usefulness, responsibility or ability, especially not at the CEO level. It is purely do to with how much you can screw out of your employer.
Yes there are people who are ten times more useful than others. Even within the same profession, eg software developers, there are some who just work harder, know more, have more enthusiasm, keep learning, take a more intelligent approach.
I've worked with people who have developed entire new products in their spare time. And people who take 25 days off sick every year because they consider it part of their annual leave. Easily a factor of ten in usefulness.
Sorry El Reg, but you forgot to clarify a point to your none UK readers. Is the annual salary of 49k quids considered a high salary? Or is it something you would expect an accountant to make, or even a taxi driver?
finding the US$ or Euro equivalent isn't what I am asking about, but the actual value of the money!
This post has been deleted by its author
'"£49k is a fucking good start for an established programmer."
Define 'established'. I've got 20 years experience and I wouldn't consider anything under £70k. (And there are plenty of jobs around that pay that and more.)'
What planet are you guys on? I've over 15 years' experience in IT and I've never been paid anything like £49K, never mind 70.
There are jobs which pay £70K, but it is hardly the norm, even with 20 years experience. You normally earn amounts like that if you have a rare and valuable skill set which is in demand.
Work like that will often dry up at some point, so if you are lucky enough to have it I would get your mortgage paid off and put a bit away. Then if you ever end up back on £40K you can be philosophical about it.
Average UK Salary is £26,000 (£33,000 for an average household) higher for London and lower for certain deprived areas.
£49k is around what you'd expect a senior manager in a non-financial firm* to earn in London - accoring to the Institute for Fiscal Studies in 2008, £49k puts you in the top 10% of earners.
(* City boys & girls get more)
Average UK salary is a meaningless thing, 9 people earn almost nothing 1 is super-superrich --- on average all 10 are superrich.
Median salary is more like £20.5K [of course England is richer than Wales, NI, Scotland; strongly biased by the 4million working in London; numbers e.g. via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom ], so we're speaking close to 2.5x median as a requirement.
--
This law seems impractical, as it would be only fair to apply it to all inhabitants. So a policeman with 20years of experience goes on a week of holidays, comes back, is denied entry -- far below the 49K mark. Three privates come back from a tour of duty, one is let in (their combined incomes just scrape over the mark).
£49k? Yes please! Hell even £30k would be step up right now...
Don't worry, the UK positions are still being advertised for silly money. For the past 3 weeks I've been emailed the same job vacancy a few times for a local 3rd line "buck stops here" support role for £22-24K. The latest iteration of the advert is offering £23-£26k.
Remember kids - there is a shortage of IT staff in the UK, so train hard then reap the rewards! Oh and don't forget to relearn everything you do every 2 years otherwise you're on the scrap heap!
We've had issues with this in the past, where we were faced with 3 options:
- giving the employee a 5 figure pay rise (which we couldn't afford / justify)
- the employee being booted out of the country (after 8.5 years here, including 5 at Uni)
- the employee moving to London were the pay level can be achieved (which they did)
The annoying thing is, if you go into the details, it includes any London weighting in your salary, so if a government department says £30k nationwide == £36k London, and the cut off is £33k, the guy working in Manchester/Leeds/wherever doesn't qualify, but the guy in London does.
And as the target salaries are based on a national average, that are skewed by London salaries, the non-London jobs are always going to fall below the limit.
Seems very badly thought through, putting non-London firms at the disadvantage that any foreign potential employees can't work for them, and meaning that there will be very little immigration into these cities of workers (just fuelling the right wing low opinion of foreigners).
"Sorry. Typical bloody left wing too. It's one area in which... Sorry, it's one of the areas in which they are all as bad as each other."
It is unwise to so typify opposition to increasing the population of one of the most densely populated countries in an over populated world. We are not self sufficient in food (production decreased by 5% since the cold war 'ended'), we are not self sufficient in energy (which is a dwindling resource), we are not self sufficient in fertilisers (peak phosphate has been passed, and Morocco is the main producer), and our water resources are subject to drought, both because of over consumption and because of climate change. Thus we have increasingly lower reservoirs, and we find that farmers are increasingly not allowed to use river water for irrigation purposes.
Worse still, by continually building more houses and the support systems these require (roads, shops, hospitals, car parks [...]) we further restrict the trickle down of water into underground aquifers at the same time as increasing the probability of flooding, of which we have seen a lot of late.
We were overpopulated at the beginning of the last century.
As to being 'typically left wing', it is not; even after the last election, when they were under no illusions about the opposition to their immigration policies, Labour conference attenders were remarking on their disappointment that the agenda was not more 'internationalist', that they wanted to see more immigration. That's left wing for you; rooted in fantasy island thinking, rather than based on the reality that we have to reduce the population of this world, and thus of the more densely populated parts of it, or we will die due to over consumption of resources.
Demonising people by describing their opposition to their country being over populated as attributable to a political view is not merely politically dangerous (because the implication is that they are racist) but is also dangerous in terms of the survival of a national group:
"[...] in my view, mass migration and the management of immigration is now the greatest challenge facing all European governments. We have to get away from the notion that anyone who wants to talk about this issue is somehow a racist; they are not, they are intelligent, ordinary people who are interested in the future of their own country"
Dr John Reid, UK Home Secretary, in a speech at DEMOS on 9 August, now gone from the cache but partly quoted here:
http://www.civitas.org.uk/cohesion/immigration.php
I have yet to see anyone offer any kind of a priori or a posteriori proof that opposition to immigration is racist, 'right wing'. It appears to me to be thoughtless, when thought is very definitely the order of the day. Otherwise, for catch all thinking, -11 out of 10
Calm down Reverend Malthus... current built up area of the UK is hovering somewhere around 6-7% (full report here: http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/14854/).
I don't think we're quite ready to build massive walls, rename it Brit-Cit and hand over the keys to the Judges just yet.
Here's an idea, jump on a train or drive a car and actually take a trip outside of the M25 for once. The further you go, you may be surprised to see fields of green and not an immigrant or native in sight.
Better yet, get on an airplane (or take a boat if that offends your environmental sensibilities) and leave the island for a while to go see a world full of deserts, forests, mountain regions and plains which are largely unspoilt.
The world does not have a population problem, it has a logistics problem.
You don't think that the tabloid press and populist politics, let alone certain right-wing biases (whether tory or NU-labour) have anything to do with this?
I think they do. And, in the end, individuals are caused to suffer according to the whim of Sun headlines and politicians.
When a person has settled, for a number of years, in a country that made them welcome when their presence was economically required (which is where most immigration actually began), it is iniquitous and inhumane to eject them from what has become their home because their salary is below levels that I, in middle management, never even reached.
I have been hearing this crap about resources for decades. Back in the 1950s, it was, "they come over here, they take our houses, jobs, blah, blah, and blah." It's the same ignorant tosh today.
It's Alf Garnet style racism, just updated with some trendy modern terms.
...are screwed then. It's already very difficult for universities to employ non-EU postdoctoral researchers, but this rule means that "permanent" lecturer jobs for new lecturers (which never start at anything near £49,000) can't establish a long-term research group in the UK. I know that my University (one of the top Universities in the country) already has trouble attracting lecturer-level staff of sufficient quality.
Well done uk.gov, you've just badly hurt research in this country. Have fun reaping the rewards!
We continue to have loads of employers game the system, they'll list ads locally (as they are required to do) but require like 10 years experience with products that have only been out 2 years. If people are honest, they are told they don't meet the requirements; if they claim 10 years experience, they are called out for lying on their resume. Then they hire H1Bs, claiming there is nobody local qualified. The Department of Labor does not even do their job of enforcing H1B rules properly so this just continues to happen.
The ridiculous thing is, firms do this to reduce what they "have" to pay, but with the poor local economy, they WOULD find locals now willing to work at these pay rates they offer! They just won't even consider hiring them!
They wanted an engineer with minimum 3 years 3G/CDMA experience.
Bloody thing'd been released only 6 months earlier.
However, without exception where I was (Camberley) the HR staff were all girls, most under 30, with absolutely NO technical knowledge whatsoever.
So visa holders need to be in the top 10% of earners, makes sense after all the employers can't find their equal in the whole of the EU.
So long as the salary doesn't include benefits that employers can fiddle e.g. accommodation at £100 a night for a bedsit. Taxation starts at day one so they can't do 179 days and then claim all the tax back whilst making them work for free for 6 months in their home country.
Of course its all a bit late the big companies are working their way slowly through the eastern European countries now.
I don't really understand the thinking behind this £49k barrier. I get the impression that it is trying to protect the jobs of the "majority" - those whose roles might be quickly given to immigrants for less money.
But I can't see this having much effect. Any worker in the UK already competes with workers from the other 24 Schengen countries who have employment rights by default. Schengen covers over *400 million* people. In addition, I hazard a guess that there are tens of thousands of workers from non-Schengen countries working in the UK both legally, and "illegally" on student visas etc.
The horse has already bolted hasn't it?
And as someone above pointed out, this might have a detrimental effect on UK competitiveness when outstanding individuals cannot come to the UK because they have been priced out of the market.
.. and I left the UK in 2009 because it was *impossible* to find a decent job. Now live and work in EU, so I don't see where these workers are who will command £49k+ and are willing to forgo the better salaries and lower cost life in the EU.
The UK is fucked. All low paid jobs are taken by minimum wage drones from abroad, middle wage jobs are trying to get highly skilled staff for meagre salary, and the top end barely exists.
When I started in this business in the 70s, it was easy to get a job. You could find one in the local paper every week. Good luck trying that now.
Britain has never been a traditional immigrant target country as Australia, Canada and the U.S.A. are - yet further demonstrated by this short-sighted Cameron plan. Singapore encourages immigrants and look at their standard of living.
I read in the last month where a poor immigrant worked for years in the automotive spares business, in the UK, and when he sold his company he made millions. These stories are common in immigrant countries.
Setting such a high threshold does nothing other than to stop immigration which, from what I read on-line, is the intent of the Tory party. If income levels are to be the determinant then it should be based on the median income of the country, Bankers incomes are the exception but I bet not too many, other than Fred the Shred, would make the threshold.
When Britain vacated HingKong it issued passports that effectively denied the right to immigrate to Britain, a scheme that prevented the most innovative people from immigrating and bringing benefits to Britain.
Remember when washing dishes was considered a starting job for immigrants? The joke is now on Westerners, for there are many Westerners, in HongKong, working as dish washers to earn enough to survive! Talk about poetic justice.
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