Minimum Wage

We tried that in victorian ages. Doesnt work. Workers dont have the resources or skills to protect the value of their labour.

No one is forced to hire anyone, but if you , you must pay a basic wage

true, but that's not controlling the market...

I'm against it on all fronts - people shouldn't be forced to pay people more than they're worth, and it simply increases the unemployment rate and causes more people to rely on tax money over the private sector

Of course it is. When one side has a huge structural advantage over the other in determining the relationship between labourer and capitalist, then it amounts to control. If you bring a knife to a fight with me and I have a machine gun, I am almost certainly going to control the nature and outcome of that fight.

Then you'll get employers driving everything to the lowest standard and paying people as little as they can get away with as they no they won't be punished or stopped (and if you need a job you are going to take it if there are no alternatives)

Let's say there is no UK minimum wage and someone can't afford basic necessities, how do you think they should live/get funding for things from since you're against a basic amount?

the victorian ages were the early years of capitalism where the wealth was largely still in the hands of the ultra-rich whereby the feudal days where only about 100 years~ gone and the wealth ownership was still in the same hands to a large extent - there was monopolism which hadn't been eroded by the market. also, technology and means for creating good quality houses for relatively poor people hadn't been invented yet so people were very willing to work much harder for worse houses because it was all that was on offer at that time. the victorian era is not a good place to start when criticising capitalism, it's like going to a poor african country and saying "see? socialism doesn't work - everyone's starving and there's no technology"

We are more unequal than victorian times. How close or far feudal days where is irrelevant . Cut throat unregulated capitalism serves capitalist not the workers.

Doesnt matter if technology is advanced or not people need food and to pay rent. Rent is probably higher in 2014 that it was in 1814 even adjusted for inflation .

Its like going to a poor african country and saying having no environmental protection laws doesnt work, its like going to a poor african country and saying poor rule of law doesnt work

Massively for, it's absolutely essential to help prevent employers from exploiting workers. It is also essential to ensure people's dignity, and make sure that they have enough money to live properly. Everyone should get a reasonable wage for a hard days work, it isn't like it isn't still pretty low.

We were told it would lead to a rise in unemployment. It didn't.

I wrote this in another similar thread:

"By imposing a minimum wage you exclude from the labour market people who can`t produce goods or services to that value. Many of these are young or vulnerable.

When I left school in 1997 the NMW didn`t exist. As a daft boy I had no saleable skills but managed to find a dogsbody position in a factory. I was paid about half what the NMW would have been, however it was probably a fair reflection of what I could produce at that time. Crucially, I got a few months work experience and a when a full-time job (with a large pay rise) became open I applied and got it. Had the employer been forced to pay me twice what they were, then they simply wouldn`t have taken me on in the first place straight from school and I wouldn`t have got the full-time job. Surely it was better for me to gain the experience I needed to get a proper job, rather than sit on the dole simply to suit someone's political agenda?

Fast forward to 2012 and i`m a site supervisor on a construction project for a bluechip IT company. I was approached by a local charity via the client with the view to giving work experience to a teenager from a "chaotic home". The NMW meant he had to be paid £5/hour. He had no skills and the only thing he could do would be some manual labouring (when he wasn`t on the phone or smoking joints). He simply couldn`t produce goods or services worth £5 in an hour. I could only take him on as the charity gave us a lump sum to bring his hourly rate down - without this he would have cost us money, and we need to at least break even to keep everyone else in a job. Had we been forced to pay him NMW then he wouldn`t have got his first job, wouldn`t have got a good reference for the future, wouldn`t have had some male authority figures in his life for once, and likely wouldn`t have stayed out of prison or off heroin. Surely equipping him with these essential life skills is an improvement to his standard of living?

I can appreciate your point about exploitation but the law of unintended consequences has to be considered."

That person doesn`t just cost the £6 per hour though. There`s also the employers NI, HR costs, uniform etc. which can be substantial.

For example, the latest figures I read for the cost of employing an apprentice electrician was around £18/hr, of which the apprentice gets between £5.27 and £10.20 an hour. The remainder is spent on holiday pay, personal protective equipment, provision for training, mandatory H&S training, sick pay scheme, death in service scheme, HR admin costs, employers NI, allowance for non-productivity, and a few other things. To produce a profit for the employer that apprentice needs to produce between 2x and 3x their hourly rate.

Are you for or against the existence of a minimum wage? In my opinion it should be just over benefits but no higher, in order to dissuade people from sitting around scrounging all day, but it undoubtedly does have a negative effect on business to some extent.

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I used to take the free market approach in opposition to the minimum wage however in recent years we've seen unemployed historically low for a recession of the magnitude we saw and a number of other advanced economies like Germany and Australia have de facto minimum wages that are much higher than the UK but unemployment that is lower which suggests to me that the minimum wage is not quite the burden that the free market suggests it is, this is also backed up by evidence suggesting that real profit has risen over the past few decades.

Not that different at all - that £6 an hour employee is likely to cost £8 or £9 once all the other costs are taken into account. Then there is the profit element on top. So realistically that NMW employee needs to produce about £10/hr.

Without the minimum wage, supermarket giants etc. would be costing the government much more money as their checkout staff would be reliant on welfare to make up for their living costs.

I wrote this in another similar thread:

"By imposing a minimum wage you exclude from the labour market people who can`t produce goods or services to that value. Many of these are young or vulnerable.

When I left school in 1997 the NMW didn`t exist. As a daft boy I had no saleable skills but managed to find a dogsbody position in a factory. I was paid about half what the NMW would have been, however it was probably a fair reflection of what I could produce at that time. Crucially, I got a few months work experience and a when a full-time job (with a large pay rise) became open I applied and got it. Had the employer been forced to pay me twice what they were, then they simply wouldn`t have taken me on in the first place straight from school and I wouldn`t have got the full-time job. Surely it was better for me to gain the experience I needed to get a proper job, rather than sit on the dole simply to suit someone's political agenda?

Fast forward to 2012 and i`m a site supervisor on a construction project for a bluechip IT company. I was approached by a local charity via the client with the view to giving work experience to a teenager from a "chaotic home". The NMW meant he had to be paid £5/hour. He had no skills and the only thing he could do would be some manual labouring (when he wasn`t on the phone or smoking joints). He simply couldn`t produce goods or services worth £5 in an hour. I could only take him on as the charity gave us a lump sum to bring his hourly rate down - without this he would have cost us money, and we need to at least break even to keep everyone else in a job. Had we been forced to pay him NMW then he wouldn`t have got his first job, wouldn`t have got a good reference for the future, wouldn`t have had some male authority figures in his life for once, and likely wouldn`t have stayed out of prison or off heroin. Surely equipping him with these essential life skills is an improvement to his standard of living?

I can appreciate your point about exploitation but the law of unintended consequences has to be considered."

I read an article in a newspaper that they were gonna increase it to £7 an hour. Looks like its not happened .

true, true - some of them are a great asset to our society, but a lot of them aren't, especially if they're claiming welfare benefits

To be fair, you can't really call what's been carried out in the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea etc Socialism, it's State Capitalism. Socialism, to me anyway, is where you extend democracy to every area of life so that businesses and politics are controlled by neither governments or boardrooms of executives but by everyone. That means you can "roll back the frontiers of the state" as libertarians like to put it, and power won't just shift from governments to elites but everyone will be responsible for their own destiny. One of the biggest misconceptions about socialism is that it's about massive state intervention, even Marx (who I'm not that big a fan of) believed in eventual dissolution of the state.

Until we've had true socialism, we can't really comment on whether it works or not.