Wages in the UK for an unskilled factory worker or Office junior are less than £13,000 a year before taxation. When myself and my husband, who just so happens to be an unskilled factory worker, had two children, I sat down and worked out with the help of a friend on social security that penny for penny we were in exactly the same financial income as herself, even though my husband works 40 hours a week.
Add to this the fact that any repairs needed are done for free for her, as she is in social housing, yet when my boiler split, I had to find £1000, actually puts her in a much better position.
Does the fact that people who can work but do not, against people working 40 hours a week and being worse off, not come across as wrong and unjust to you, it does to me?
This is not just about the weekly monetary value, because you may be lucky enough for nothing to break down and you never take advantage of the free repairs that go with the free house. One thing is for certain though, there is no need to worry about it, be scared that your children will be cold in winter. You just phone a help line. What do you do if you have no disposable cash or credit and an urgent repair needs to be done?
This indeed happened to me in February and I had to find a £1000 out of thin air, so it went on the credit card. With the deep snows and having a child in the house, under 6 months old, I had no other option, and to some they do not even have that option. So now we are not only on par with people that do not work, but are carrying more debt also.
I am not stating that I wish for people on social security or social housing to be worse or lose these things, but for someone to realize that when people have a strong work ethic and want to pay their own way, that the wages should match that ethic.
In the UK we have a tax relief benefit that is available for families such as mine, so now not only do I stay trapped at home because my partner and I can both see that we would be at least £100 a week worse off if I went back to work 40 hours a week, but that we are made to feel obliged to someone and made to feel like the social security scroungers that have never seen a job door way.
It is appalling that I have to sit at home and wish I could work, whilst people such as my friend used in this article, can not work, even though her boys are teenagers. Why can she not work? Because she has a dog. Yes tax payers, you heard that right, she takes your money because she will not leave her dog.
As you can tell, my rant is not about people who use the system genuinely, it is against those that abuse the system and also the system itself that makes this happen.