nsmith1180:
James the cat:
nsmith1180:
James the cat:
All this wanting to work hours you want any old time, self employed business is corrosive to working conditions in the longer term. Short sighted. I don’t have a great opinion of long term “lifestyle” limpers.
Why don’t you have a great opinion of those of us who don’t tie into the company line just for a quiet and easy life? Why are we the subject of your scorn because we are willing to take the more difficult route to achieve the work/life balance we want?
I explained why in my first sentence. Your misguided interpretation of not towing the company line is undermining the long term survival of working conditions.
We have employment laws, for years terms and conditions have been argued over, we can still obtain employer pensions (under attack), we still have paid holiday in this country. Yet some people see fit to bypass all this for their short term gain using IR35 dodging self employment, umbrella schemes and various other dubious methods of hiding what should be employment.
When we’re eventually forced into sitting on self employment counting our receipts and idly mulling over the latest HMRC letter demanding a return whilst waiting for the phone to ring, excuse me if I don’t buy the lifer limpers a pint. I probably won’t be able to afford it.
So let me get this straight. Somehow, by not competing with you for your nice secure job, I am making your job less secure? Perhaps I should go back into full time and show you up for what you are, you are the paid worker version of benefits street! In your arguments so far you have cited the way I put at risk your company pension and your 5.6 weeks Annual Leave. You have accused me, falsely I might add, of tax evasion.
You have shown that the only drive you possess comes from the beating heart of whatever fleet spec FM, R460, Premium or CF75 your loving boss deems happy to inflict on you. As for your claim that employer pensions are under attack, you are wrong. More people are being provided with employer pensions now because of auto-enrollment and if the defined benefit pensions are dying out, that is only because they are unsustainable. More people are now living longer which means that the money saved away to pay for pensions has to go further and it cant, thats why your cushy company pension is erroding, not because I have ambition.
On to the tax thing. If I had done 48 hours a week, (full time contract) for 48 weeks last year at £10 per hour on a full time contract I would have paid £2,779 in combined tax and NI payments. Instead I created £9k of VAT, which under the flat rate scheme I was required to pay £4.5k to the exchequer. I didn’t pay income tax last year because my earnings didn’t reach the threshold required. I didn’t need the money so I left it in the business. Because of asset purchases last year the government gave the company Corporation Tax relief which equaled the amount of tax owed.
Had I not had plans to buy assets in the future, to build a business and in time, give someone, almost like you but with a better attitude a full time job, then I would have taken a dividend, payed tax on that and contributed yet more to the exchequer than you could even hope of doing.
SEDriver - Thanks for the support but I don’t think your argument is going to carry much weight with this idiot. All he seems to care about is the fact that our choices put in jeopardy his god given right to ground rabbit droppings, disguised as coffee for 20p a cup.
I’ve read this thread and I’ve got to say, ignoring the teasing there are salient points. If you think you can dine out on enjoying this situation until you retire I think you’re in for a bit of a surprise. I work in aviation. We have agency on steroids in this industry.
Think of it as the haulage sector in ten years. Aviation was always a place with pretty decent pay and conditions relatively. Similar if not a lot higher in a lot of cases than medicine. Ahh ha, what a drop in the last ten years. We now have a UK based airline that has crews solely working through an agency filing tax returns. It’s called Norweigian Long haul. Completely legal and known to the UK government. Crews busy, offsetting expenses, filing returns. They have bare employment rights, poor pay, sorry, gross figures, rubbish leave and the rest is a mess. Years ago working agency as an airline pilot meant working overseas for Korean. It was a stop gap, lucrative, tax returned as you worked overseas and viable financially for the short term because no one really wanted to do it, then it arrived here with Ryanair. Now it’s rife. And you never hear a UK pilot now say he has better terms and pay working via third party agency. It’s decried in the UK.
And the hay making agency workers of old find they’re surrounded by everyone else and the mobile terms have descended to match the mobile status they work under. Be careful what you triumph as being good and be careful with what you wish for.
By the way I think you’re far too sensitive, we call each other far worse in flying. Lorry drivers normally had a sense of humour when I did it? I started agency 15 years ago to get a start and got a ribbing but laughed it off. A sort of right of passage, what happened?? Everyone is so serious these days 
,I heard the never to be forgotten words
…ffs!
.