How Much is a fair wage
For many Year we have all been told to work hard get ahead look after our families All noble sentiments,
But how much money is really required to do this
Apparently The average wage is 75k per year (i know just 3 people on this sort of money).
Most People are on closer to 40k a year, Some can push to 50k with a lot of overtime.
Now after paying for the basic's (food/rent etc) WE are no longer really a CONSUMERS. So no Coffee shops/vacations/Movies/No outing's ,But I feel everything is based on "75K" idea.
How much do you Feel should be the basic's to once again to encourage a work ethic that many of our younger generation or the people that are called Dole Bludgers Fail to hold anymore.

People earning the minimum wage get approximately $18/hr.

People earning $75K per annum are getting about $38/hr.

Then you have the ridiculous earners such as professional athletes on $200,000/yr minimum for having fun playing the games they love. Television news readers probably get about the same for doing something that takes no special skill at all. Some CEO's receive million dollar salaries for running their companies into the ground.

All those working in retail and hospitality are earning closer to the minimum wage and if they are lucky enough to be working a 5 day week they might be taking home $400 weekly.

On the other side of the coin small businesses such as a local convenience store, café, or small hotel cannot afford to employ people for more than the minimum wage without severely eating into their already slim profit margin.

Its a Catch 22, as soon as the minimum wage goes up, those at the top feel they also deserve the same percentage increase to stay in alignment with the bottom and then price increases rapidly follow. There is never an opportunity to bring some balance into the equation.

I don't believe its much different anywhere else in the world. The rich have always called the shots and there isn't much we can do about it. The only answer I have is for people to learn to live within their means, budget wisely and try to stay happy.

Don't envy those with more, they still have the same personal crap and garbage in their lives that everyone else has to deal with, they just do it in more expensive clothes.

Aussieboy, we have a very unbalanced system. It would be easy to blame the unions. After all it is they who got process workers in a car factory paid well over $100,000 a year, while they did nothing for check out chicks, on about a third of that. Surely the check out chicks job is equal to a process worker, but with the extra requirement of satisfying & being nice to customers.

A reasonable wage is one where the employee can produce his cost, including all overheads, & return some profit to the employer. I was in the position once where I employed 26 people, in a low margin exchange components industry, & found increasingly the cost of employing most of them was greater than they could actually earn. I was taking home less than my adult employees.

The cost of employing people, & other overheads were increasing faster than I could increase my prices. I had to down size to just the best, most productive 8 employees to make a reasonable return.

Luck can have a big bearing on income. A friends daughter, with no real qualifications, was a clerk for a not highly profitable large company, earning about award wages. She lucked into a similar job with a defence contractor, on a little more.

A couple of years later she is recognised as a highly efficient, productive lady, & is earning well over $60,000, & is often the target of head hunters.

I was lucky enough to be head hunted from a not too successful attempt to raise beef, to my last position. I was already over 50, & unlikely to get an interview if I applied for a job. I was fortunate that someone I had done business with in the past needed a manager he could trust, & he thought of me. That gave me another 12 productive well paid years I would not have had without a little luck.

Labor's Rudd and Galah'd (with thanks to Obama who got her name right) devastated the nation's economy and Rudd in particular, scrapped the effective Pacific Solution thereby creating the perfect storm for a deluge of economic migrants who cost the taxpayer $billions.

Yet Rudd and Galah'd walked into their youthful retirements with $180,000 pa for life fully indexed and gold entitlements such as First Class air travel and taxpayer paid offices and staff.

How much is a fair wage? Maybe it is Rudd and Galah'd who should be asked the question. -Especially since both of them refused to accept the recommendation of a parliamentary committee to correct the very unfair CPI indexation of the superannuation of military and public servants that rapidly diminishes the value of the pensions they employees paid for.

onthebeach,

It seems you have an obsession with the previous government but are yet to acknowledge the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the current one.

When it comes to superannuation, it was Rudd/Gillard who removed the (Howard instituted) overly-generous tax concessions for "mega-rich" but one of the very first things Abbott did did after the election was to reinstate them.

He now has to back-track and remove them again while typically placing the blame on somebody else.

There are also lots more ex-politicians feeding off the public purse than Gillard and Rudd but it was Latham that stopped that Defined Benefit rort for all the ones that followed.

wobbles,

Thank you for that, but pointing out what others did or didn't do does not dispel my argument.

My concern is as always, that the taxpayer get value for money. Where the subject is fairness I chose two politicians who put themselves on a pedestal for claimed fairness to workers, but whose behaviour was the exact opposite.

As an example of blatant hypocrisy it would be very difficult to go past PMs Rudd and Gillard who were very quick to base their own claims for vastly higher pay on the earnings of the very few, the elite who make their way to the top of public agencies. Politicians were very insistent that their pay as the 'masters' and 'employers' should be no lower than their 'employees'. Impossible to shame, PM Gillard was to take pay higher than Barack Obama, the President of the US and higher too than the PM, UK.

Yet the same 'worker sensitive', ex-union lawyer Gillard (and Rudd) ignored the criticisms and recommendations of a parliamentary committee to change the unfair CPI-linked indexation of her employees, the military and public servants. It was and remains, a very clear example where sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. Hypocrisy.

It is true that Abbott has done no better and he recently played politics with military superannuation, which is cynical politics.

The only honest brokers have been the Greens. The Greens deserve full credit for looking independently and compassionately at the plight of retired public servants and military, and developing a policy,

http://greens.org.au/fair-super

Well done, Greens.