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serious gaylord posted:You link to the post and still make up the quote about it. I don't say a single thing about abolishing poll tax nor that it leads to a slippery slope in that link. Ok then, what is your position on the abolition of poll tax?
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Nov 10, 2014 18:42
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LemonDrizzle posted:How do you mean? I was simply describing the way the student loan repayment system works (for all intents and purposes, it's a graduate income tax), not making a comment about its merits. Sorry it seems I may have misunderstood you. You're asking why if you only have to pay your student loans after you get paid over a certain amount, why do people get paid such high amounts?
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Nov 10, 2014 18:43
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Ddraig posted:Maybe we wouldn't need a defence budget if we didn't spend the best part of several centuries killing and maiming across the world. That would also require that everyone else didn't want to go killing across the world. It's not called a defence budget rather than a war budget just for PR reasons.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:43
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Spooky Hyena posted:Ok then, what is your position on the abolition of poll tax? It was before my time and had no bearing on me so I don't really feel anything about it. However because it was so widely hated and so poorly implemented I think that people should not be pursued for it. In the very post you quoted I noted that and my point was that would people use the government making a public statement about not pursuing people for poll tax debt as an excuse not to pay their council tax? It was a question, not a statement. Its nice that you can admit to making up lies to slander posters that disagree with you though.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:46
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HortonNash posted:It's not a new thing. Bit of a huge difference. Coram's fields is a seven-acre park in the middle of London run by a charity that is free to enter. They want to provide a place specifically for children to play. If they dropped their rule they would be over-run pretty quickly by tourists, picnickers, joggers, etc. and their intention of being a free kids play area would be out of the window. They have a legitimate reason for barring adults since it would affect their ability to provide a fun space for kids, and as far as I know they don't suggest the rule is designed to protect against paedophiles. The other place however is a for-profit theme park in weston-super-mare who have explicitly said their ban is designed to protect children. They are just being idiots.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:47
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serious gaylord posted:It was before my time and had no bearing on me so I don't really feel anything about it. However because it was so widely hated and so poorly implemented I think that people should not be pursued for it. In the very post you quoted I noted that and my point was that would people use the government making a public statement about not pursuing people for poll tax debt as an excuse not to pay their council tax? It was a question, not a statement. So you're saying that legacy poll tax should be abolished, but also it shouldn't be abolished because it'll lead to people not paying other taxes? Do you see why that might lead someone to the wrong conclusion? Do you see why someone may read that and think that you may not support the abolition of poll tax? Anyway, it's moot. You're a doofus, you don't see any issue with drug screening and you think that people who don't bootstrap themselves to office work are worth less. You still have all these bad opinions and you pick this one and argue to the ends of the earth that what you posted actually meant whatever. Spooky Hyena fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Nov 10, 2014 |
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Nov 10, 2014 18:48
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serious gaylord posted:Sorry it seems I may have misunderstood you. You're asking why if you only have to pay your student loans after you get paid over a certain amount, why do people get paid such high amounts? No, I'm asking why there should be any connection between the cost of a degree and the salary you expect after graduation; if you borrow £36k to do a BA and MA in underwater basket weaving, you shouldn't necessarily expect to be well paid afterwards just because your education was expensive. I made the comment about the repayment system because it actually protects people who end up in that situation for whatever reason.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:52
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Spooky Hyena posted:So you're saying that legacy poll tax should be abolished, but also it shouldn't be abolished because it'll lead to people not paying other taxes? Do you see why that might lead someone to the wrong conclusion? Do you see why someone may read that and think that you may not support the abolition of poll tax? I didnt say that at all. I asked a question that if a government made a public statement about not pursuing poll tax debtors would that lead to people using it as an excuse to not pay their current council tax. I would suggest you improve your reading comprehension before you make personal attacks in the future. Please also quote the posts where I say I have no issue with drug screening and that people who don't bootstrap themselves into office work are worthless.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:53
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They're on the last sodding page, you tit.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:54
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Spooky Hyena posted:They're on the last sodding page, you tit. I think if you read the posts you won't actually see that.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:54
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You don't see that when you post something like "Interestingly quite a few complaints about Greencore are about the drug testing. I don't have much sympathy for those complaints to be honest.", people might see that as a dismissal of concerns over drug policy?
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Nov 10, 2014 18:57
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What is the greencore drug testing policy? Are the people being tested in positions where they're using heavy machinery and need clear judgement for safety reasons?
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Nov 10, 2014 18:58
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Spooky Hyena posted:You don't see that when you post something like "Interestingly quite a few complaints about Greencore are about the drug testing. I don't have much sympathy for those complaints to be honest.", people might see that as a dismissal of concerns over drug policy? I think it would be seen as that I have little sympathy for their complaints. I have no time for someone that accepts a job with a drug testing policy and then complains when they fail it because they cant stop taking illicit substances. Should these policies be in place for certain industries? Thats a whole new question.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:59
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Private Eye posted:What is the greencore drug testing policy? The discussion was about assembly line sandwich making, which doesn't use heavy machinery. Other jobs in the company might use them, making the rules just a case of one-size-fits-all. serious gaylord posted:I think it would be seen as that I have little sympathy for their complaints. I have no time for someone that accepts a job with a drug testing policy and then complains when they fail it because they cant stop taking illicit substances. "cant stop taking illicit substances" is one of the symptoms of addiction, you see.
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Nov 10, 2014 19:02
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Nov 10, 2014 19:05
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Private Eye posted:What is the greencore drug testing policy?
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Nov 10, 2014 19:08
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Spooky Hyena posted:The discussion was about assembly line sandwich making, which doesn't use heavy machinery. Other jobs in the company might use them, making the rules just a case of one-size-fits-all. Yeh, this is a case where obviously there are jobs that need testing, and those that don't. If there's any chance that an error in judgement could lead to safety issues then drug testing should happen. Not so much if not. And one-size-fits-all doesn't generally work best. However, I can see in a large organisation that a blanket drug testing policy is easier to administer than tailoring it to departments. If you've got a fluid line, then making sure that only people who've been tested can work the machinery can be a logistical headache, and its probably easier to just test everyone and not have that hurdle there. Whether they could test everyone and just ignore the results of the people who aren't involved with dangerous stuff or not I don't know. Pragmatically speaking though, its probably easier and cheaper to sort out testing everyone than just testing the select few. How do other companies do it? Guavanaut posted:I think they urine test during the initial acceptance/orientation process. Breathalyzing/active substance screening of employees while they are on the job for safety reasons is one thing, but metabolite testing for what they are doing in their own time is a different matter. Well yeah this is a bit much that I definitely don't agree with. Private Eye fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Nov 10, 2014 |
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Nov 10, 2014 19:09
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jabby posted:Bit of a huge difference. Coram's fields is a seven-acre park in the middle of London run by a charity that is free to enter. They want to provide a place specifically for children to play. If they dropped their rule they would be over-run pretty quickly by tourists, picnickers, joggers, etc. and their intention of being a free kids play area would be out of the window. They have a legitimate reason for barring adults since it would affect their ability to provide a fun space for kids, and as far as I know they don't suggest the rule is designed to protect against paedophiles. Yes you're right about the reasons for Coram's Fields' policy, the difference in the situations. Just having had experience of supervising primary school field trips and almost every time having to fend off weirdos who harass children makes me think that it's not exactly outrageous to have some spaces where unaccompanied adults aren't welcome. I had one trip where several men approached 9-10 year old girls and made inappropriate comments, and on the same trip I had to confront and threaten to call the police on another man who was following a female classroom assistant and sexually harassing her in front of the children.
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Nov 10, 2014 19:13
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Spooky Hyena posted:Ok then, what is your position on the abolition of poll tax? There's a difference between supporting the poll tax being abolished and supporting the government writing off any poll tax owed.
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Nov 10, 2014 19:16
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serious gaylord posted:Well its a common thing I see. My job is physical so its harder. Its a load of tosh of course. I'm not exactly the most hard working Brit in the world at the moment but I've gone from working in an office to working as a night shift shelf stacker. Working in an office is harder in a lot of ways, you get no exercise, if you aren't busy you have to entertain yourself to make the time pass and you have to think around problems fairly regularly. However, unless you're working in an incredibly busy office the amount of work you do in any one shift in a physical job is much higher. Everyone on shift with me who has been here for any amount of time limps and hunches (and has enormous lats) and since its night shift everyone is quite mad. For me though the main thing that should probably factor into pay is the calorie consumption involved, mainly because I work in a job where I consume a lot of calories and would like to have money. In my salad days I used to work out a total of about an hour and a half a week and had to consume nearly 3000 calories a day, now I do anywhere from 16-32 hours a week and I'm becoming pretty drat skinny; its virtually impossible for me to eat enough in the tiny breaks we're given with no provided food other than two vending machines full of poo poo. If I was one of the poor bastards here that works 7 days a week I'd have to spend half my pay on food alone to keep even, a lot more if I wanted to do this healthily (inb4 people tell me about the wonders of cheap eggs).
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Nov 10, 2014 19:18
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I think you were doing salad days wrong.
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Nov 10, 2014 19:20
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I worked for awhile with the DWP and one of my jobs was arranging appointments for people coming into the UK to get NI numbers and getting their details sorted- I spent a lot of time talking with employers who were booking appointments for multiple workers from Eastern Europe, and the workers themselves. There was a very common reason for them coming, and that was even at minimum wage, they were easily earning 4 or 5 times the amount they would have at home- they would come and work for a few months or so, living as cheaply as possible (employers often set them up with cheap short term housing e.t.c, some would even bring suitcases of food/toiletries with them), then return home with a tidy sum. If you paid me £25+ an hour to make sandwiches, then I would make the best loving sandwiches around. However, to people here long term, minimum wage is absolutely poo poo. Even after you struggle through a labyrinthine benefits system to get things topped up enough so you aren't starving or freezing to death in your poorly built hovel, you still aren't going to be able to afford anything other than a bare existence. Factory work is demanding physically and mentally- anyone saying otherwise hasn't loving done it. Drug testing can gently caress right off though, I have no problems with employers requiring their employees to be sober enough to work, but with many substances they can be detected weeks or even months after the effects of the drug have worn off. An employer pays for the time worked, and shouldn't have a loving fragment of control of what you get up to outside work.
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Nov 10, 2014 19:27
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jabby posted:There's a difference between supporting the poll tax being abolished and supporting the government writing off any poll tax owed. Semantics isn't my strong point, but wouldn't still expecting outstanding fees be a discontinuation rather than abolition? It's not like the slavery abolition act expected slaves to carry out the rest of their contracts before being emancipated (although if I remember right, the act did designate them as "apprentices" instead of slaves so this was only a technical thing)
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Nov 10, 2014 19:31
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A pretty simple drug test - can I tell you are on drugs/drunk? Is it impairing your work? No? You passed! Yes? You failed! Not sure? Look into it further - worker may be clumsy or exhausted. (Note, does not apply to jobs where others and own safety may be affected due to not immediately obvious effects of drugs)
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Nov 10, 2014 19:36
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Private Eye posted:Yeh, this is a case where obviously there are jobs that need testing, and those that don't. If there's any chance that an error in judgement could lead to safety issues then drug testing should happen. Not so much if not. And one-size-fits-all doesn't generally work best. Its important to remember that someone died not 2 years ago by falling into a cake batter mixing machine which wouldnt really be classed as heavy machinery. He was drunk though, not on drugs. Locally someone at a food place lost their arm below the elbow when they were still off their face on ketamine from the night out before and thought reaching into the boxing machine was a good idea. All machinery is dangerous if you're not sober.
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Nov 10, 2014 19:39
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serious gaylord posted:Its important to remember that someone died not 2 years ago by falling into a cake batter mixing machine which wouldnt really be classed as heavy machinery. He was drunk though, not on drugs. Yeh, if you're operating any machinery that has the potential to be dangerous then you absolutely should be tested, and for the night before work or however long it takes for the substance to get out your system and stop affecting you. There's not really a room for error in some instances and it should be zero tolerance with drugs and drink. Drug tests don't have the sensitivity of discerning only a few days before though, so maybe in a choice of 'test them, remove the chance for them to come in under the influence' and 'respect their right to do what they want at home, run risk of them coming in under the influence', drug-testing technology limits them to the former. To be clear, testing them before orientation/ interviews I don't agree with. Circumstances and practicalities make testing during work a blurry area though. Of course employers shouldn't have the right to test you for what you do off the clock, but they should be able to test you for the days before work that would influence your performance at work. It's probably too complex and nuanced to just say "testing people for stuff they do off the clock is wrong". Horses for courses and all that.
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Nov 10, 2014 19:54
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There are better tests now. We already breathalyze people instead of testing their piss for alcohol metabolites, and that's an example of the right way to do it. Whether you do random breath tests across all employees or whether you give the foreman discretion to say "that guy looks a bit worse for wear today" is debatable, but they are both better options than how employee testing for other drugs is done. One of the prominent newer tests is saliva based, and afaik is used by police for investigating driving under the influence. Saying 'this person smoked a joint some time in the past week' wouldn't pass in a court for drug driving, and nor should it on the shop floor, so they should really be moving towards tests like that.
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Nov 10, 2014 20:18
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A case could be made for drug testing at the application process to weed out people that would get collared after they've been given the job and thus have wasted everyone's time. However they should be using the tests that indicate if they are still under the influence. Knowing that Jimmy did a few lines at the weekend isnt going to give anyone any benefit.
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Nov 10, 2014 20:22
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DesperateDan posted:However, to people here long term, minimum wage is absolutely poo poo. Even after you struggle through a labyrinthine benefits system to get things topped up enough so you aren't starving or freezing to death in your poorly built hovel, you still aren't going to be able to afford anything other than a bare existence. Factory work is demanding physically and mentally- anyone saying otherwise hasn't loving done it. Yeah, and the long-term thing makes a difference psychologically too, because you don't see a light at the end of it. For a lot of people that's their existence, long hours doing tedious, repetitive mechanical tasks, forever. Then go home exhausted and try to get some rest in between all the other things you need to do Private Eye posted:It doesn't justify low wages no, but goes some way to explaining the wage structure. Low wages need to be addressed by a hard floor to the structure, with strong minimum and living wages that are well clear of benefits thresholds so that people on those wages aren't needing welfare. Sure, you need something to change in the system - it doesn't make sense for businesses to pay decent wages voluntarily, because free-market competition is built around the idea that the strong will eliminate the weak. A business that pays well will be punished for it. All the incentives in the system are towards exploiting workers as hard as possible. If you have specialist skills or knowledge, that gives you more leverage to negotiate (which is where average wages really come from), but if you don't then you're easily replaced, so you're easily exploited. Minimum wages and welfare help (it was worse when poor people were basically left to die in poverty, like how capitalism still operates in developing countries) but they don't fix the underlying issue - free-market capitalism creates these conditions by design, the state subsidising payroll and providing a bare minimum existence to the pool of unemployed takes the edge off, but you have to keep raising them with inflation. And there'll always be unemployed people by necessity (otherwise there'd be competition to hire people for unskilled work and it would raise wages through lack of supply), so you need to make sure welfare is actually enough to live comfortably on. But businesses (as a whole) want unemployment to be punitive, a stick to beat people with so they're desperate enough to accept any work in any conditions, and they fear losing their jobs. So really, we have a system that's built around the idea of regulating the excesses and consequences of capitalism, but often run by people who are pro-capitalist or capitalists themselves. Like now, where we have a government that's 'pro-business' and 'making Britain competitive' which are euphemisms for attacking that safety net and workers' long-term security, so businesses can extract more profit So really the whole system needs overhauling, if we really want people to be guaranteed a good standard of living out of a sense of basic human decency, instead of judging their worth based on how easily they can be leaned on
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Nov 10, 2014 20:30
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Spooky Hyena posted:Semantics isn't my strong point, but wouldn't still expecting outstanding fees be a discontinuation rather than abolition? It's not like the slavery abolition act expected slaves to carry out the rest of their contracts before being emancipated (although if I remember right, the act did designate them as "apprentices" instead of slaves so this was only a technical thing) Let's avoid semantics then. Plenty of people think the poll tax was a bad thing, but don't believe it should be written off. They are two separate things to have opinions about.
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Nov 10, 2014 21:03
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This is completely anecdotal, but having done both minimum wage office work and (slightly-higher-than) minimum wage assembly line work, the latter was personally far less soul destroying. I'm not yet sure why this is, but it probably comes down to the feeling of there being some inherent value in the work you do, even if in the greater capitalist scheme there really isn't.
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Nov 10, 2014 21:06
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Ok, so what the gently caress is going on in the House of Commons tonight?
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Nov 10, 2014 21:20
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Umiapik posted:Ok, so what the gently caress is going on in the House of Commons tonight? I think Labour were just embarrassed? I've no idea, I'm not sure even BBC News quite follows it.
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Nov 10, 2014 21:22
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Umiapik posted:Ok, so what the gently caress is going on in the House of Commons tonight? May's trying to get a limited debate on opting back into the EAW. Rebel Tories and Labour want a full debate, and failed at forcing it (by proposing that the question be not now put). TinTower fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Nov 10, 2014 |
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Nov 10, 2014 21:23
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Back when I did soul-crushing minimum wage menial work I used to really look forward to the few evenings a month when I could afford to get pissed. It helped make the work bearable. It's one thing for someone to have a lovely dead-end and tedious job with no redeeming qualities besides the pay; it seems like a shame to forbid them from even using recreational chemicals to take the edge off in the free time they do have.
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Nov 10, 2014 21:43
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I've worked night shifts in breweries, printing plants, desert factories and also a trolly factory and if you had tests for illegal drugs or alcohol then the jobs would have been shipped out to Poland even quicker than they were. For temporary workers getting high at some point on shift isn't that unusual and for the long term workers at the breweries, especially on night shifts, alcoholism seems to be something that happens. nanny state gone mad. Doing production line work like putting bits of chocolate onto deserts or moving bottles of Blue WKD from a conveyor belt onto a tray for hours at a time really do need you to have dulled your mind somehow to get through it. At least I have been put off supermarket deserts forever and if I worked in a sandwich factory I'd probably be put off store bought sarnies as well.
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Nov 10, 2014 22:41
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On drugs talk, I had to give a urine sample for my ~office job~ so it's not confined to manual labour by any stretch. I think US employers are quite keen on the idea. TinTower posted:May's trying to get a limited debate on opting back into the EAW. Rebel Tories and Labour want a full debate, and failed at forcing it (by proposing that the question be not now put). The Torygraph has a briefy summary here, describing the government as behaving "like a sack of greased weasels". quote:MPs have voted for something. Quite what depends on who’s talking about the vote. Theresa May says the Commons has given its view on British participation in the European Arrest Warrant. John Bercow says that’s not technically accurate: the vote was on a statutory instrument that would incorporate into British law a range of European justice powers that does not include the EAW, which is already in our law. Mrs May concedes the point but insists that the vote is “indicative” on the EAW because ... well, because she says it is. Conservative MPs, who has been promised a vote on the EAW directly, beg to differ. Edit: The BBC has a much more complete summary here. Even the Speaker is laying into them. Prince John fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Nov 10, 2014 |
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Nov 10, 2014 22:44
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I hear China shut all their desert factories due to the unsustainable growth of the Gobi...
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Nov 10, 2014 22:46
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Prince John posted:On drugs talk, I had to give a urine sample for my ~office job~ so it's not confined to manual labour by any stretch. I think US employers are quite keen on the idea. They really are, for pretty much any level / type of role. As well as standard criminal background checks for pretty much any job.
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Nov 10, 2014 23:02
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Metrication posted:I hear China shut all their desert factories due to the unsustainable growth of the Gobi... i see u already have ur coat
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Nov 10, 2014 23:02
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