Living Wage - be careful what you wish for!

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Are you deliberately avoiding the question because you know you're wrong?

You asked me what I would do as prime Minister. I told you.

Because wages at the lower end of the labour market aren't set by supply and demand they are set by legislation - minimum wage and benefit rates define the bottom of the market

If we removed the minimum wage and let pure supply and demand take hold wages at the bottom end of the market would plummet (lets call that the notional equilibrium market rate). There is a massive oversupply of manual labour which would drag down wages. How low is anyone's guess, but I would suspect they would end up somwhere are Edwardian wage rates - ie roughly at the rate where any further decrease would cause the workforce to starve to death.

The extent to which you would need to reduce labour supply in order to move the notional equilibrium market rate above the minimum wage would be huge, and unless you could then wages still wouldn't rise. The reduction you would need to shift the market higher than the minimum wage is much greater than simply turning away some immigrants or building a fence at Calais 100ft high.

You would need another Somme.

They are set by supply and demand. Just that supply and demand has been manipulated by Big Business.
 
Fair enough, you've got no idea how to introduce a "living" minimum wage in lieu of in work benefits, without making the poorest workers worse off. Don't worry, neither has anyone else.

In the current economic landscape and political landscape it is utterly pointless to even try. But the mechanics of it are very simple.
 
Cinema business set to sack 25% of staff after they won right to be paid the Living Wage: Cinema workers who won a campaign to adopt the London Living Wage have been told that a quarter of the workforce is now facing the sack. Picturehouse Cinemas said that the cost of increasing basic wages at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton to £8.80 an hour would be absorbed by reducing the number of staff by at least 20, with a redundancy programme starting next month. Two management posts will be axed along with eight supervisors, three technical staff and other front-of-house workers from its workforce of 93. BECTU, the union that represents cinema staff, described the move, which came after a year of strikes and negotiations, as a “kick in the teeth”. The union is now preparing to ballot its workers on a further round of strikes at the popular arthouse cinema.
Did a u-turn: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/lond...n-in-row-over-london-living-wage-9827867.html

You see, there's power in a union....
 
I'm a shareholder. I'm not rich.

My little boy is a shareholder in a Child Trust Fund. He's not rich.

I have a pension (do you?) which invests in shares. I'm not rich.

Hell of a lot of people just like me who want and need shares to provide a return or capital growth.
I was more referring to the big investors who hold the lions share of a company and not the many small shareholders who have pin money shares. Obviously they are not all rich.
I'm sure you and your son don't rely on your shares as a source of month by month income. Unlike the workers this thread is about who do rely on their wages as an income source.
In this day and age nobody who works for a living should live on poverty level wages, which more or less describes the minimum wage.
 
I don't think that's true. you have money put aside and this money is invested in return for a future cash flow. I don't see that as gambling.
So you don't think the value of investments can go down as well as up? I know they always say that bit really quiet right at the end at 300 w.p.m., but you should be aware. Or do you live in a sort of capitalist Utopia where everybody wins, that you see anyway?
 
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