Your main point stands though - tech jobs pay much worse than they do in the states. The only two competitive uk tech jobs I seen are DeepMind and hedge fund (not even investnent banks are competitive)
Problems start when these institutions get systematically dismantled and salaries don’t change to make up for them.
Healthcare costs can be very important for Americans working in low-wage positions, but are essentially irrelevant for tech workers.
Here's how healthcare costs impact my life on an hours-worked basis:
Monthly health insurance premium: 20 minutes of my wage per month
Office visit at a primary care doctor: 12 minutes of my wage
Office visit at a specialist: 15 minutes of my wage
Maximum amount I can possibly pay in a year (eg, if I get in a car accident and spend months in intensive care): 20 hours of my wage
To be clear, the American who is driving Uber full-time or cooking food at McDonalds would have a drastically worse situation, and their costs might be multiple hours worked to see a doctor or multiple weeks of wages to cover a catastrophic hospitalization. But on a tech salary, healthcare is trivially covered.
Presumably your employer pays much more than that? Which still technically money you earn, you just don’t see it
With the salaries US tech workers are earning, healthcare, welfare and childcare benefits don't substantively impact their take-home for it to matter.
Anyone tech worker buying a home now needs a bigger down payment or will face a massive mortgage. Add in the inflation of food and hygiene products, a $100-$150k year salary has the buying power of $50k a couple decades ago.
The politicians know exactly which screws to turn to prevent the proles from getting too much leverage. It’s been part of the playbook for decades, we were just not honest decades ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
It’s all sleight of hand. Buying power is being nerfed to spank the kids into compliance.
The UK (possibly influenced heavily by US culture) seems to reject it as something that doesn't apply to them.
Not that the end results are great. But it only sets the bottom and usually people negotiate up from there.
I agree there are many causes well known even 15 years ago (including propensity to prefer social welfare to investments and hard work), but the collective blindness is astonishing.
Why every time when someone points out the fact that tech workers in Europe are severely underpaid in relation the US someone always sees it as a personal attack.
How does that in any way justify lower salaries pretax?
> With these institutions in place life looks qualitatively different at any salary.
I’m not sure it does. People who earn above the median rarely have access go welfare (unless its child related). Also working for an American tech company you’ll have decent insurance and can save another 50k per year just in case anyway..
As someone who's worked at high income levels in both the US and the UK: The US is emphatically better at high income levels. The employer-paid benefits were miles ahead of my socialised care (or even private insurance) in the UK. Yes, they're employer-tied, and that's a real risk worth considering, but from a purely personal standpoint that's a risk I'm willing to take.
(Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer that this wasn't the case, and that life was qualitatively better for lower earners even if it was marginally worse for high earners in the US.)
London may as well be considered its own country with the difference in cost of living to the rest of the country