Punish the Job Creators, The Businessmen, the people who bring in the money?
Squeeze them so that they stop providing it in the UK?
Good Plan!
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Take the hit, reduce your own cut, raise prices if your market will take it,
If not, or you arenāt getting enough out of it to be viable, shut up shop and let your custom and jobs got to a business that can run profitably without paying itās employees slave wages
The situation where businesses are paying staff such low wages they are need Universal Credit to give them enough to live on while the directors and shareholders are getting big payouts is ridiculous
It means us tax payers are subsidising the low wages profitable businesses pay while they rake in the profits
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Let your custom go to China?
Is that what you are arguing?
Quite a lot of it has gone to China already.
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Well it might be unfair if they achieved all that on their own, but they depend on the work of others to make them rich, donāt they?
If they canāt provide it without being fair to those who make it possible for them to provide it, then yes, they should bugger off.
Well I like it. 
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I canāt see letting it go to China is worse than keeping it here and providing the goods and services by exploiting and underpaying our own people?
And all the while the taxpayer topping up their wages paid by low paying employers while those employers take in the profits
Itās a complete myth that businesses canāt afford to pay a decent wage.
With the decline of the unions, of course theyāre not going to. Whose going to make them? Not a Tory government for sure.
Weāre back to greed, tax dodging and not paying their way
Raise the living wage and you betcha not nearly as many businesses would go under as are telling you their sob story now.
And I think any companies that are making good profits shouldnāt be allowed to pay out any dividends to shareholders or make directorās loans if any of their full time employees are on such low wages they get Universal Credit
A wage is a part of the cost of an employee. Only when all of the costs of an employee have been exceeded by the added value the employee brings does having an employee make sense. The very idea of paying a āliving wageā is ludicrous. In fact paying a minimum wage is nonsense. Instead let the free market decide the rate. I like free markets in all things. They work and produce greatest efficiency.
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Work for who? And efficient at what?
It sort of depends where you are in the food chain and how you judge efficiency
I suppose we could go back to strong unionisation, so that the workers could maximise their bargaining strength in the āfree marketā. Get wages up that way. It would mean going back to having strikes all over the place again, but at least there would be the satisfaction of knowing that the free market was making everything run efficiently. 
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Yes, and exploiters of the system
And yet the very same people are often hyper critical of benefit cheats and want to bring back hanging for it
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The Tories have raised the minimum wage. When an employer takes on an employee they not only have to pay the wage, but they also have to make NI contributions on that wage and also pay into a pension scheme for that wage. Some employers also pay sick pay and maternity leave, etc. All employers have to pay holiday pay.
The national minimum wage is currently Ā£9.50 so an employer will have to be paying out much more than that to actually employ somebody.
Universal credit also now encompasses tax credits, which was something Tony Blair brought in, it should have been him upping the minimum wage rather than expecting tax payers to pay it. Now itās the Tories who are having to sort out that mess.
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The minimum wage was first introduced by Tony Blair in 1999 with the aim of cracking down on the exploitation of low paid employees. During his Premiership he did raise it and during the Blair years
Under the chancellorship of Gordon Brown the economy was fairly steady - the longest uninterrupted period of growth in 200 years .
I donāt get your point?
What a sob story, do you expect me to weep for them? Is that the worlds smallest violin I here you playing in the distance? 
Itās absolutely right, and the law, that employers should pay those things as well as the minimum wage. And the minimum wage should be higher
Thatās their contribution in return for their profits and it should be a fair one 
Itās the Tories who have pushed through this cruel and complicated Universal Credit system while keeping the minimum wage low and letting the taxpayers subsidise companies profits
What is cruel about Universal Credit? Itās a good way to reduce the handouts of taxes to the indolent and/or those unwilling to move to places of lower cost of living. One aspect of the ruinous āWelfare Stateā that really gets up my schnozz is so called child benefit. Why shoul tax payers be supporting the upbringing of other peopleās brats? A child TAX is much more appropriate.
Ask me if I care. 
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Should you care?
Well we got it for two kids, so I canāt really complain about anyone else getting it, can I?
Why not? Times change and circumstances along with them.
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Actually, I donāt feel entitled to complain about anything. Iām retired, they pay me enough to live on, plus a bit besides. I donāt long for anything I canāt afford, so things are okay as far as Iām concerned, regardless of what the state give to anyone else.
What if youāre running a small business like a buildersā yard or a corner shop? Thereās a limit to how much you can take a hit in your own pocket and, if you raise your prices too high, bang, there goes your client base. Therefore, you probably end up laying off one or two people just so you can a) pay one or two more than the living wage and, b) not raise your prices. Nett outcome = higher unemployment = more money being spent on unemployment pay.
Yes, and all of it built on borrowed money. Remember the note left by the treasury person when the Tories got in? āSorry, thereās no money left.ā Says a lot that does.
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If you are running a small business than can only be profitable by paying your employees slave wages and you genuinely canāt take a reduction in your own cut ( and this is a sob story I donāt often believe) then itās morally not viable and it should close and let the customers go to other businesses that can pay a decent wage and survive
The people who lose their job are in poor, low paid jobs anyway and may well be able to find better ones with companies that pick up your trade and pay a decent wage
Because of the business paying low wages, the taxpayer would have been subsidising the pittance they paid your workers anyway so any temporary unemployment benefit wouldnāt be much more than the Universal Credit
Plus unemployment payments might be short term, until the employee gets a new job paying the new minimum wage and wonāt need Universal Credits from the taxpayer
While if the situation of the small business paying low wages were allowed to continue indefinitely, then the taxpayer subsidising that business by topping up the employees wages while the business made a profit, would continue indefinitely too
It would be sad to see businesses closing if the minimum wage went up but I donāt think as many really would as are claiming they would
And at least it would break the cycle of businesses knowing they can increase their profits by paying low wages and counting on the taxpayer to top them up and subsidise their profit making by having to pay their employees Universal Credit