Hourly rate

When I was eighteen I had a girlfriend who was sixteen turning seventeen, she had a elder sister who was eighteen.


The eighteen year old sister was a secretary for the boss of a reasonable sized factory in the village and her fiancée was also eighteen and worked in another factory, both having been at work for three years . Between them they had got a mortgage and had bought a house that the girls dad was helping them to do up, but neither set of parents had helped them to buy it as far as I know.


Later in life I ended up meeting my wife who left school at sixteen already having got a job at a Building Society with an agreement that she would do a business studies BTEC day release at the local college , I met her when she was eighteen and a year later when she was nineteen we went to get a mortgage for our first house and the building society she worked for gave us a staff mortgage based purely on her earnings, as she met the 3.5 x earnings = mortgage ratio and it was easier to ignore my earnings as I was already self employed.


Back in the 70’s the earnings potential of kids leaving school at fifteen and sixteen by the time they were eighteen, particularly if they went into an unskilled factory job is unbelievable to kids of today. The message we got from school though was that if you took an initially better paid unskilled job you would be stuck for life and whereas if you accepted lower pay for training and qualifications you would win in the long run.


When I did the electrical courses in my forties there was a guy training with us who had stood on the same two foot square piece of rubber matting operating a press in a factory making lorry wheels for twelve years and yearned for the freedom of being one of the maintenance electricians in the same factory, as they had the freedom to walk about and have a bit of banter throughout their working day, but becoming an electrician would potentially mean taking a pay cut.


Even though I went to a grammar school the idea of going to university was never a really serious consideration for many people I was with. I did consider it after I did the C&G Technicians certificates and went to a Birmingham University open day, I was had an application form for the British Antarctic Survey team as a maintenance guy, but in the end decided to carry on working around home. There’s a couple of what ifs!


 Andy B.

When I was eighteen I had a girlfriend who was sixteen turning seventeen, she had a elder sister who was eighteen.


The eighteen year old sister was a secretary for the boss of a reasonable sized factory in the village and her fiancée was also eighteen and worked in another factory, both having been at work for three years . Between them they had got a mortgage and had bought a house that the girls dad was helping them to do up, but neither set of parents had helped them to buy it as far as I know.


Later in life I ended up meeting my wife who left school at sixteen already having got a job at a Building Society with an agreement that she would do a business studies BTEC day release at the local college , I met her when she was eighteen and a year later when she was nineteen we went to get a mortgage for our first house and the building society she worked for gave us a staff mortgage based purely on her earnings, as she met the 3.5 x earnings = mortgage ratio and it was easier to ignore my earnings as I was already self employed.


Back in the 70’s the earnings potential of kids leaving school at fifteen and sixteen by the time they were eighteen, particularly if they went into an unskilled factory job is unbelievable to kids of today. The message we got from school though was that if you took an initially better paid unskilled job you would be stuck for life and whereas if you accepted lower pay for training and qualifications you would win in the long run.


When I did the electrical courses in my forties there was a guy training with us who had stood on the same two foot square piece of rubber matting operating a press in a factory making lorry wheels for twelve years and yearned for the freedom of being one of the maintenance electricians in the same factory, as they had the freedom to walk about and have a bit of banter throughout their working day, but becoming an electrician would potentially mean taking a pay cut.


Even though I went to a grammar school the idea of going to university was never a really serious consideration for many people I was with. I did consider it after I did the C&G Technicians certificates and went to a Birmingham University open day, I was had an application form for the British Antarctic Survey team as a maintenance guy, but in the end decided to carry on working around home. There’s a couple of what ifs!


 Andy B.