British people don´t want to be lorry drivers for minimum wage, this is true.
You are not mentioning the elephant in the room, the unwillingness for many companies to pay anything more than poverty level wages.
You are not mentioning the elephant in the room, the unwillingness for many companies to pay anything more than poverty level wages.
Of course they should be better paid. I hold a belief kindergarten teachers should be paid more than high school teachers, or at least as much.
If we want to die of lack of sanitation, not paying people to clean up is a good way of getting there faster. And so on: these low pay jobs are anything but unimportant: they're just jobs we don't seem willing (societally) to pay for or do, hence persisting underemployment by less educated and demotivated working classes in europe: intergenerational unemployment is a trap.
Employers, and people in jobs that are currently safe benefit from that (cheap food, cheap construction, cheap service) and therefore "hold beliefs" over how things should be, or why society strangely just doesn't seem willing to pay more...
Other than that I think we are in agreement.
Back of the envelope says about £20/hr for an experienced driver. Minimum wage is 8.91 and going up to 9.50 , so HGV driver is about 2x that.
Maybe that’s still too low but far off minimum. Also consider that tax is progressive and you don’t pay much tax on this level of earnings.
Record profits seem to occur when there is some monopoly power or other situation that allows companies to keep prices high while still forcing down costs. I think the book "Rentier Capitalism: who owns the economy and who pays for it" does a great job of describing the situation. As a bonus it focuses on the UK.
My opinion is that Europe needs Federalization and Deregularization to remain globally competitive. There is plenty of room for growth (which actually tends to be fueled by immigrants) if the molasses can somehow be dissolved. Doing business in Europe is a royal PITA (imho).
The same you be said about public officials and Twitter. You have to be really ambitious to ward off and defend sensible policy against people on the mental level of teenagers.
I don't think Europe needs any of the suggestions because I don't see how this is connected to the problem. The rooms for growth are in the developing countries and they do grow. At least partially.
You got a second layer on that. The unwillingness to not buy from the lowest bidder.