Interesting Facts

According to a report, commissioned by property company CBRE, people who play organised sport tend to be £500,000 better off than people who don't. (Experts say that organised sports such as cycling , football, rugby, etc. can boost a person's annual salary significantly due to the skills they gain from participating in group activities, which over an average 47-year career could amount to a significant boost of £522,000 in wages . Of course, you could argue that people who earn a lot have more disposable income to play sport.  That said, I wonder if disorganised canoeing counts.)

14th May 2014 is Donate a Day's Wages to Charity Day (no use me doing that then - one day I'll be able to pay myself). It's also Mark Zuckerberg's 30th birthday, but his salary is only $1.60 per year. It's also Chicken Dance day. You can decide which, if any to celebrate.  

According to a report “Tailored Wages”, British high-street clothing labels Debenhams, Matalan and The North Face are among the worst high-street clothing shops at paying a fair wage to those who make their products. (The analysis of 40 top European clothing brands showed that many major chains are still doing very little to make sure that workers abroad, who produce their goods, are paid a living wage. The global fashion industry, worth more than £28bn across Europe alone, pays its workers so badly that many cannot afford to live with dignity; earning no more than £5 a day. The Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed on April 24, killing more than 1,100 people.)

Allegedly, the two biggest welfare recipients in America today are Wal-Mart and McDonald's. (So, how does that work out?  Well, according to a report in Bloomberg, American fast food workers received more than $7 billion dollars in public assistance between 2007 and 2011. McDonald's even had a “McResource” line that helped employees and their families enroll in various state and local assistance programs. It exploded into the public when a recording advocated that full-time employees sign up for food stamps and welfare, and has since been closed down. According to the same report, Wal-Mart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients. They are also the single biggest group of food stamp recipients. Wal-mart’s "associates" are paid so little, according to Congressman Alan Grayson, that they receive $1,000 on average in public assistance. Once upon a time, if you were unemployed you needed financial help.  Working hard and still needing government hando...

The latest government figures, from the Office for National Statistics, show that on average British wage-earners have taken a £5,000 pay cut over the last five years. (Wages and salaries for the middle fifth of non-retired households fell from £33,100 in 2007-08 to £28,300 in 2011-12. Over the same period original income, which is the income households get from employment and investments, fell from £37,900 to £32,600, while cash benefits rose from £3,100 to £4,600. We can't blame the recession either, as the figures show that the decline predates the big slump. How does that song go?  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. )

According to a report by    the liberal think-tank CentreForum, the UK   Government invests around £7bn a year on childcare support. (This is the fifth highest spending rate in the developed world, and only the Nordic countries spend more.  Funding is provided to very low income families and covers most of their childcare costs.  The crazy thing is that these low income families need help because even though they work, they don't earn enough to be able to pay for the childcare that allows them to work, so the tax payer is really subsidising low wages.  How about employers providing childcare for employees?)

According to research by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), the British executive gender pay gap has increased. Male executives in the UK are paid over £10,000 (11,260 euros, $16,270) more than their female counterparts. (The worst thing is that at the current rate of change, they expect this inequality to last another 98 years!)

According to the Daily Mail, there are five times as many full time male staff who earn over £200,000, which is more than the prime minister does, as women at the BBC. (In addition, there are twice as many men on more than £100,000 at the BBC and the average man's pay is £41,916 while it is only £36,827 for female employees. They spent £212 million on star salaries last year, but I guess with a budget of £3.5 billion, they can afford it. I have to say I wasn't surprised by this story, the BBC is a perfect example of the "old boys network" in action. My question is, is there an ''old girls network'', and how do I get in it?)

According to researchers from the University of Sydney and Canberra's Australian National University (ANU) being obese in Australia does not mean you get paid less. (They found no wage penalty to being overweight or obese in the Australian labour market. Strangely this is in contrast with previous studies that used older data from the United States and Germany and found that people with a higher BMI (body mass index) earned lower wages. One explanation may be that because fat Australians are now in the majority, they don't face discrimination any longer.)

According to researchers from the University of Sydney and Canberra's Australian National University (ANU) tall people in Australia earn higher wages than their vertically-challenged colleagues. (They found a strong link between wages and height, particularly for men, with each additional 10 centimetres (four inches) of height adding three percent to hourly wages. I guess you can just tower over your boss and demand more money.)

According to the EU's equal opportunities commissioner, the disparity in wages between men and women in Germany is one of the highest in the European Union. (The reason given is the high percentage who can't work full-time because of child-raising responsibilities. KKK - Kinder Kirche Kuche.)

powered by ODEO According to Prison Service Order 4460, all prisoners in the UK who participate in purposeful activity must be paid. (The current pay rate is not subject to the national minimum wage and the average pay is £9.60 for around a 32-hour week, which works out at around 30p an hour. Of course their bed and board is paid for.)

powered by ODEO According to a United Nations report called "State of the future", in 2007 25% of the world's population were living on less than $1 a day. (Thankfully this is down from 1980 when 40% of the population were doing so, but I'm afraid that that is probably more to do with inflation than philanthropy. My premise is that if you can't pay a living wage to someone, do the work yourself. Anything else is slavery.)

Germany has agreed to introduce a minimum wage for postal workers. The minimum wage, which will be introduced on Jan. 1, 2008, is expected to be €8.00 ($11.70) per hour in the states of the former East Germany and €9.80 ($14.35) per hour in western Germany. (Luxembourg-based Pin Group immediately announced that it will cut more than 1,000 jobs in Germany in response, they currently pay between €7 and €7.50 per hour on average.)

According to the Spiegel, a German carworker earns just under €50,000 a year on average. (Wendelin Wiedeking, the chief executive of car maker Porsche, in case you were wondering, earned more than €60 million in 2006.)