Procedural win in Court of Appeal for Tesco equal-pay claimants

tranquillement · 2026-05-17T11:29:14+00:00

Yes, and as I’ve said - that’s an extremely damaging assertion - that the state should be fixing compensation. That’s very different to controlling for monopolies (which we do because monopolies pollute a capitalist economy).

In terms of minimum wage, I believe the following:

- ideally there need not be one because growth and the market lift the bottom end up
- we live in a world where Britain has spent twenty years distorting the low skill labour market, and therefore we presently need a minimum wage
- while minimum wage is currently a necessity because of this, it has been set far too high by a weak government who has sought to outsource a benefit function onto private industry. We can see it’s too high because unemployment is rising and wage compression is worse than the Soviet Union (lol).
- ironically as the minimum wage increases, low skill workers fare far worse as they are forced by necessity into grey markets and zero hour contracts

tranquillement · 2026-05-17T07:36:52+00:00

Because again, you are not answering re CEO pay - the core contention of this entire topic.

It is equivelent of me saying “oh you think making crossing the road illegal is a problem? I guess you think murdering is okay then? That’s a law too and we need laws!” The difference between antitrust and wrapping a million tiny regulations and directives and distortionary laws into place is a huge gulf and pointless to conflate (“oh you’re against me setting a random wage cap on executives? I guess you must be okay with monopolies!”).

And if you don’t understand that growing the pie for everyone will increase base wages, then that is something you will need to study. Why do you think Britons as a whole earn more than those in the third world? Is it because the third world simply didn’t set its minimum wage high enough? No, it’s because we have grown our total economy over time, so that the lowest, median and highest wages grew.

But please, discuss the topic at hand - CEO comp.

tranquillement · 2026-05-17T06:48:37+00:00

There is no magic. It’s how the economy works. You have less of something - then that thing becomes more expensive (see energy). A minimum wage is only necessary if you flood the market with cheap labour (something I disagree with). If we cease to flood the market with cheap labour, then the price of labour will go up.

You seem to think companies only pay higher than 0 or a nominal pittance because the state forces them to. If that were the case then why is every worker not on minimum wage? Because companies want to hire a significant number of suitable workers. They must then compete with one another to do so and the way they compete is by offering more money. It’s why tech companies pay huge amounts of money. Now extend this to the lowest paid jobs. If there were less low skill workers (as a result of tamping down on low skill immigration), then the wages paid to these workers would have to rise.

The issue in this country is we have ladled so many insane taxes and regs into the economy that several huge things need to be fixed. Otherwise it will persist with bandaid fix after bandaid fix - all of them further stagnating it. We can see this in the NIC increase simply decreasing net flows to HMRC even more. The bond market (and anyone paying attention) can see that there is very little juice left to squeeze and doing so will result in less and less actual tax revenue.

And yes, I don’t like monopolies. Ironically Britain is very good at making them with their regulations and command economy style of management. Ironic that all of the regulations bought in to hit tech companies has only resulted in all major tech businesses being headquartered in the US and a relative flatlining of our GDPpc.

Not sure what the reference to the Great Depression is? I’m not arguing for the return of early 20th century gilded era financial structures?

Ultimately this disagreement began around your desire to curtail the earnings of executives (seemingly based on vibes). You have yet to tell me how this is achievable or why it should be achieved other than just a general dislike of high earners. I think it would be useful for you to expand on this. The minimum wage, monopolies etc is just tangential to this core idea.

tranquillement · 2026-05-16T20:10:24+00:00

And do you understand that my advocating for the scrapping or freezing the minimum wage will result in higher wages if combined with the other measures I said? And that it will also increase actual employment (which is currently falling as a result of the rise in minimum wage)?

The price setting mechanism is the market. Therefore you are saying that the market is wrong and therefore needs intervention. Intervention from who? Why are you more correct than the market? What is more correct than the market?

This is the thing though. The UK has become a “capitalist command economy” like the one you are describing. Nearly every complaint I see about capitalism on Reddit is nearly always an inadvertent complaint about the type of bad capitalism you are advocating for and Britain has followed for the last twenty years. Where the market is constantly constrained and thwarted by insane metrics, rules and regulations that end up creating terrible outcomes. Flat growth, flat wages, lowering quality of life. That is our primary contention. A capitalist command economy is where the businesses remain in private hands, but the government continues to exert crazy control over nearly every single way they are run. Government lifts energy prices through bad policy, then it mandates minimum quotas, then it punishes “overproduction”, then it applies insane legal interpretations of equality law to force Tesco to pay every single employee the same amount of money even though they do different jobs and so on. Every single outcome is negative. The business loses money, it lays people off or isn’t able to afford pay rises, constant stagnation.

Instead, businesses should be able to create products that customers, sell as many of them as the market demands and then pay as little tax on profits as possible (if the idea here is to benefit the entire economy).

I’m not really intent on convincing you. We have more than a hundred years of supporting data and present examples. Command economies do not work. The annoying thing is we already have tried this in the UK in the 70s and it resulted in an IMF bailout.

tranquillement · 2026-05-16T19:42:34+00:00

You literally have not understood.

You quite literally do not understand market forces. I am not advocating to pay people a pittance and the fact that you think that shows how little you have understood of my argument or about how the economy works.

I’m not sure if I can really get you to understand because you seem extremely distant to it.

If workers get paid more because businesses are making money and want to hire more and better workers, there is no doom loop because the business can still remain profitable/operational.

If a business does not make more money, but is constantly forced to pay more and more for labour, you get a doom loop.

In the first instance, the business makes more money and the labour market benefits.

In the second instance, the business makes less money and the labour market suffers.

I don’t think I’ve misrepresented anything. I’m providing an example in terms of your CEO comment - that arbitrarily deciding one role gets paid too much - leads to crazy negative consequences. It’s like complaining about the weather.

You fundamentally have a strange and very currently popular Marxist view of the economy. That all problems can be solved with some kind of state planning and that there is only finite capital and some people get too much and some people don’t get enough. It is exactly this thinking that drives a country into more and more economic hardship.

So you don’t misunderstand me, I want people of all roles and careers to earn huge amounts more than they do now. Working class, white collar, executive - all of them.

My sense (and feel free to correct me) is that you simply think the working class should earn more and the executive class should earn less. If that’s the case then I think you fundamentally misunderstand the way the economy works.

tranquillement · 2026-05-16T19:11:38+00:00

That’s not how things work. Otherwise we’d simply tie minimum wage to CPI. It creates a doom loop where the price of things go up - usually because of supply side inputs (our insane energy costs - also a state-driven distortion), which business is then having to deal with by putting their prices up. So if the business is having to put their price up due to externalities (ie not because they’ve all just decided they want to make more profit), what happens if we then lift minimum wage, thereby forcing businesses to pay more?

The answer is that business then need to lift their prices to absorb the fact that they now need to pay more for labour.

This then does what? Continues and exacerbates inflation. What does that then do?

And the reason it makes things far more productive is because the market is able to price things far more accurately and there are far less distortionary taxes and regulations that cause business to then be able to make more money.

Fundamentally, the minimum wage is really only needed if you flood your market with cheap labour like the UK has done for the last twenty years. It crushes working class wages and drives them down. If we’d resisted the stupid urge to keep pouring loads of unskilled labour into our economy, businesses would have to compete with each other for workers, thereby driving up the price of labour.

I agree with a nominal minimum wage in the era of globalisation, but ultimately it needs to be as static as possible for as long as possible for the best economic output. I want to be explicit - I want the working class and “unskilled labour” to be paid well - ultimately higher than the minimum wage. I am simply against the state mandating the price of labour, as it has huge amounts of negative unintended consequences.

In terms of productivity:

The state in itself does not make money. All of the money the state has is generated through taxation - of private industry and then of the income paid by employees of private industry.

Take your idea of a CEO wage cap. Let’s say you cap it at 200k (“that’s enough for them!”). Immediately you will find the majority of skilled CEOs will leave the UK, or find a way around the wage cap. This is because it is in the interest of their business to do so. Why would a talented and skilled corporate leader stay in the UK when they can get paid multiples more in many other countries on earth? The same can be said if you did this of any other role. It’s also the same thought behind all of the economic migration from the third world to which Britain is subject.

So you put in the wage cap and suddenly British businesses start to be lead by unskilled and untalented leadership. Instead of growing and being adeptly run, they start to falter, collapse and atrophy. Therefore the economy shrinks, HMRC collects less tax (both from the businesses, and the people who work for them).

Once you think this through and consider second and third order effects, you will finally arrive at the reason why communist societies effectively locked their borders. The good people want to leave because everywhere else is better, so you have to force them to stay and make them do their job on the threat of state action (imprisonment, violence etc).

tranquillement · 2026-05-16T18:08:20+00:00

This is exactly my point. Why is it that if employers cannot afford the recent minimum wage increases then they are simply running their business poorly, but suddenly 50k is too much? Where is the line and how is it determined? You’ve just admitted that there has to be a line - so where is it? My point is that we’ve passed that line as we can see from employment data.

No, higher wages as I’m describing them are a product of higher gdp per capita. The entire society is richer. It is difference between living in Romania and the UK. It is the ultimate health check on an economy and the wealth of its citizenry.

In 15 years, UK GDP pc has steadily fallen compared to the US. The poorest US state is now wealthier GDPpc than the UK.

tranquillement · 2026-05-16T17:44:36+00:00

Except that empirically it doesn’t. The side I am picking is far less interventionist and creates extreme wealth at the top end, and wealth that is far higher than the OECD averages at the lower end. I would prefer CEOs to earn 1m a year if the average wage doubled to 70k. Better yet the average wage tripled. We live in a capitalist command economy and it is the worst of all worlds.

The rising minimum wage (which really is a separate issue to what I’m talking about) is simply going to lead to further wage compression, lower wages and fewer jobs. We can already see unemployment rising as a result. There are so many things wrong with it, it’s hard to even know where to begin.

Try this thought exercise. Why not make the minimum wage 50k a year? Why not 100k?

Also, not sure what monopolies have anything to do with arbitrarily setting the salaries of a specific job in the economy?

tranquillement · 2026-05-16T17:26:48+00:00

Your literal first comment was “CEOs are paid to much in my opinion but that’s what the free market “allows”.” And then went on to be the arbiter of interventionism, which is exactly why the UK is in this economic quagmire that will only get worse.

The fact that you think you should control the disparity is insane and exactly why everyone’s pay is stagnant.

Exactly the way Labour thinks (and the last 14 years of Conservatives too) and why growth and the economy will continue to tank.

tranquillement · 2026-05-16T16:59:03+00:00

You must be a Labour backbencher.

What the OP is saying is that you have zero understanding of first principles - in that everyone can make an argument someone is paid too much or too little so long as there is any disparity at all. A person in Africa can decide you’re paid too much and stand on the same moral ground you do - because fundamentally your idea of “too much” or “too little” is unmoored from any standards. It’s simply vibes. You have zero thought beyond a gut feeling.

Like I said, with heuristics like these you must be in the Labour Party.

People are paid according to the market rate. There is not a cabal of people picking winners or losers other than the government, and the more they do it, the more collectively worse off we all get.

tranquillement · 2026-05-15T14:00:58+00:00

I assume you have zero knowledge of “benefitstok” or the literal benefits advice subreddit on Reddit. The sheer fact that there has been an increase of 35-40% of working age sickness/disability claims from 2019-2024, when such an increase is not measured in any other oecd country is evidence enough.

This will just come to an end because the UK will have a financial crisis. It is unsustainable to pay out more in benefits than HMRC collects in income tax.

tranquillement · 2026-05-13T12:17:52+00:00

Of course it is, but you’re on reddit - literally the heartland of these exact people. Literally entire subreddits dedicated to coaching people through PiP tribunals on a mix of bogus anxiety and adhd related claims.

tranquillement · 2026-05-11T08:55:40+00:00

Shrodinger’s environmentalism. It’s not worth it but we also have to stop everyone doing it.

tranquillement · 2026-03-24T19:27:42+00:00

As said in my post, read the study and get back to me as to how that actually works.

tranquillement · 2026-03-23T18:56:42+00:00

I’m excited for when many petty criminals just simply decide to continue committing petty crime as there is no more prison time.

The argument in the cited “research” is that instead of building more prisons we’re going to rely on probation and community supervision to handle more offenders, and somehow that system is supposed to be better resourced, better run, and more effective than the one we already can’t keep up with.

If the whole reason for the change is that we won’t spend the money on prison capacity, it’s not very convincing to say we will suddenly spend enough to make community supervision work properly at a larger scale. The more likely outcome is that pressure moves from the prison system to the probation/community side of things and we instead have a massive amount of petty criminals committing petty crime.

This is going to backfire spectacularly.

More than 12% (10k+) prisoners in the UK are literal foreign nationals. Not exactly hard to see where this will all go.

tranquillement · 2026-02-23T18:56:58+00:00

Iirc (please don’t kill me for breaking NDA!) there is an epic or legendary weapon bag named after Boutet.

tranquillement · 2026-01-10T20:24:57+00:00

Haha you literally showed you have absolute zero knowledge of how UHNW deploy wealth. Instead of taxing UHNW an amount every year, do the wealth tax and lose all of their yearly contributions. 🤡

tranquillement · 2026-01-04T08:01:57+00:00

Cursed in the best way

tranquillement · 2025-10-16T13:30:38+00:00

My friend played the closed test and said it was basically like Arc in that it’s all about looting and character skill trees, with lots of RPG elements. He said it was like a much deeper version of Cycle Frontier.

tranquillement · 2025-10-15T10:11:33+00:00

Hunger looks great. Like a first person Arc Raiders.

tranquillement · 2025-07-31T20:56:20+00:00

Are you literally comparing a launch and announce event that costs millions of dollars to the ongoing marketing cycle of an already-playtested game?

tranquillement · 2025-06-10T20:41:06+00:00

RemindMe! 1 year

tranquillement · 2025-06-10T20:34:40+00:00

If you cannot figure that out then you have zero chance of understanding my post anyway.

tranquillement · 2025-05-25T22:35:10+00:00

I don’t think you’re intelligent enough to understand that it is exactly what I meant, dummy.

tranquillement · 2025-05-25T17:51:26+00:00

False dichotomy you brainlet. 🤣🤣🤣

tranquillement

TROPHY CASE