this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
1235 points (99.4% liked)
Political Memes
5494 readers
1943 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you're a fundamental researcher, engineer, etc. come to the UK. We've got SO many job openings for those roles and would love to bring in talent to fill those roles because the local gammon isn't up to the job.
Max pay is around 50k. Its better than most, for sure, but academics get treated way better in US or Germany
I wish I could, but good grief I'd be cutting my pay down to 25% if I moved to the UK
How much is your health insurance & car repayments cutting into your pay? What are your legal minimum days off? How many maternity/paternity days off is your employer legally required to give you? What are your employee rights? How walkable is your current city or do you require a car to literally go anywhere? It's a trade-off.
While you raise good points that should be kept in mind for anyone considering this, in my case (a very specific and incredibly in-demand type of data management) my last position was a great deal better than any offering for the same job in the UK, even including all the public benefits you guys get.
I left that job for personal health reasons (and I got a full year of unemployment from it). I'm lucky, I'm very aware of that. Most people don't have it anywhere near as good as I did. But for my field, even factoring in all those benefits from the public sector you get in the UK, I was doing way better here than I could have been in the UK (ex: I was making 4x the maximum wage for my field in the UK (tops out at £45,000)). Also my state has a requirement for 4 months of [ma/pa/xa]ternity leave, which isn't great but is still a huge improvement. And I get 5 weeks leave. And I was union. And and and ~~'murica~~ blahblah I'll spare you.
For all the many many problems America has, this is one of the few areas where the UK is somehow even worse than us. Your wages for skilled technical positions are absolutely criminal for the value you produce for employers, and for such a ~~sometimes~~ progressive country it's mindboggling to me that you haven't made a bigger issue of it. It's a huge contributor to the brain drain so many EU countries are experiencing (even Germany, who is much better about this than the UK, is feeling this) - the US is a backwards country slowly imploding into fascism, but who's country isn't? At least you can come over here and make bank in the little time before everything burns down around them, instead of having a somewhat comfortable lower-middleclass life in some subdiv row house.
(This me being defensive I confess: my city is one of the most walkable in the world. I think the "americans can only drive anywhere" thing gets a little bit blown out of proportion because people don't understand the magnitude of the rural/urban divide in the US.)
Paternity: time your pregnancy to coincide with the start of an X year contract, or they simply won't renew it.