Recently, and for no apparent reason, I’ve been involved in a number of discussions/arguments about the existence of the minimum wage in Britain. As is the norm, I seem to be the only person on one side of the argument and. in this case, it is against the existence of a minimum wage.
As it stands the minimum wage in Britain is £5.22 per hour for everyone over the age of 22. This means that for whatever work you do, you are guaranteed £5.22 for every hour that you perform your task(s). This is regardless of how meaningless or effortless your job is.
For example, one worker could be pressing one button every minute to confirm that a machine’s production task has been performed. Another worker could be working in a store, serving customers, organising stock, performing transactions and are consequently on their feet all day, busy and active.
Due to the minimum wage these two workers would almost certainly earn the same hourly salary. Now are you telling me that one of hour’s worth of pushing the same button sixty times is just as valuable as one hour’s worth of serving in a store and organising stock? I want to meet the person that thinks that’s right.
We would be able to compete with the likes of China and India without a minimum wage.
It requires far more skills, education and physical effort to perform the retail example than the button pushing one and yet they are rewarded equally. I could have performed the button pushing task at age 10 without an education or any life skills for that matter. In a world without the minimum wage that job would receive £1 – £2 at best and therefore would be justly priced.
The minimum wage is ravaging Britain’s industry and manufacturing sectors due to excessive wage demands and general labour costs. We would be able to compete with the likes of China and India without a minimum wage. I would even go as far to say that it would bring about another industrial revolution! Recession? When was that?
A counter argument I’ve heard is that it would promote the hiring of foreign workers who are more willing to perform jobs at lower wages, namely the infamous “illegal immigrants”. My answer to this is that the money gained from tax retrieved from the higher profits of firms with newly lowered wage bills would be used to majorly bulk up immigration enforcement. We could also leave the EU and therefore lose the open-borders problem we have with the Polish and eastern bloc countries because we would be far more competitive on a global scale and wouldn’t have to be tied into the EU trade agreements to keep afloat.
Another positive gained from this change would actually be a massive improvement in grades and effort of students at school. This would be because most of them would be sh*t scared of ending up in one of these monotonous, low-skilled jobs. A lot more students would stay at school past 16 and benefit because the opportunity cost of leaving school, in wage terms, would be too great. This means that our future workforce would be vastly more skilled and experienced then the current generation.
Benefit cheats and scroungers? Why have a benefit system except for those who are invalid or disabled? It makes no sense when those people who are unskilled and jobless could be performing the monotonous jobs that they complain about foreigners stealing. I can guarantee that with this strategy unemployment levels within healthy valid citizens would fall if not nullify because they wouldn’t be getting any free handouts to live their cushy job-free lifestyles.
Hopefully I’ve persuaded a few doubters with this quickly bashed out article that the minimum wage should not be enforced in this country. I look forward to seeing a few more people on my side the next time I get confronted.
Comment and Discuss!
Do you think there is ever a stage where a rich man can sit back, relax and enjoy everything he has worked for? or do we need to constantly compete with the 3rd world? Whats the point of working hard if you don’t wish to have any welfare – seems pretty pointless.
If you want our workers to be able to compete with those of China then you had better start advocating massive food subsidies that make it possible to live on a pittance, not to mention keeping rents relatively low by letting the government own all land, allowing workers to live at their factories in dorms 24hours a day (in hopeless siutations where suicide rates are unpleasantly high.) You might also want to implement a legal system which removes the system of listing buildings – one of the reasons rents are over 10times higher here is because we cannot build high rise monstrosities wherever we like to free up supply. I agree with you, we could get rid of the minimum wage if we brought in food subsidies and rent controls (but I imagine most of your subscribers would not desire that), the only alternative would be to have people earning less than they need to live on. If I were in a situation where I could not afford to live I would probably get riotous and cause major social disruption. Minimum wage is a small price to pay if you want a functioning nonviolent, or nonsocialist society.
We could have the kind of economy you envisage at a tremendous cost, some of us actually value quality of life above economic theory.
You miss the point about competing with China and India. At present we have a highly capable workforce (even for low-skilled proffesions) that is capable of producing goods to a higher quality than these newly industrialised countries however for whatever gain we provide in the quality of our products workers are paid disproportionately higher. The reduction in wage expenditure would lower unit costs and make the price of good that are manufactured by British industry more representative of the quality.
Germany has no minimum wage and has the best and most competitive manufacturing industry in Europe especially when it comes to higher quality products like cars. This is due to technological superiority and the higher capability of their workforce. Your doomsday vision of Britain without a minimum wage is what the centre-leftist general opinion would like to have yo believe but the evidence is there that developed countries can and do prosper without it’s existence.
There’s a book identified as “Avoid Retirement And Stay Alive”. The concept is the actuality that retirement has no place in modern society. In case you have the ability to make function pleasurable by balancing it against the other points you’d like to complete, then you have the ability to reside like you’ve got all the time within the globe.
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China and the UK have completely different economies. We have a tertiary based economy, China has a secondary based economy. Britain does not produce manufactured goods in the same level anymore, because our economy has changed. We cannot reverse this, as our main export is fincancial services and our resources our not in the same supply as China has. Manufacturing in Britain is falling, and it will not return.
We cannot compete with India and China, because we have a more highly skilled workforce than both these countries, who use unskilled workers in their millions, which this country does not have. We have not got the resources to be a manufacturing country anymore.
Plus if getting rid of the minimum wage will produce more educated students, because they are staying on school more, as you suggest, the amount of unskilled workers will naturally fall in this country, and therefore they will not be working in factories pushing buttons. Where is the incentive to work in these lower skileld manufacturing jobs, at an extremely low wage, if the majority of the country are higher skilled? There will be none, which is why the UK can never compete atthe same level as the lower skilled workers in China and India.
This would be a hugley unpopular political policy, and would never ever get voted into law.
The recession would not have been worse if we did not have the minimum wage. Thatcher didn’t have the minimum wage, and unemployment rose well up past 3 million, higher than this recession.
You would ruin societies welfare, which is the most important thing. People should be put first before the economy, and those who say different clearly have not got the public’s welfare in mind.
Without mentioning the moral reasons for having a minimum wage, our ecconomy greatly benifits from a minimum wage: those who are paid more are more likely to spend more, thus more money ends up in goverment coffers. Not having a minimum wage only pushes the workforce underground where there is no regulation.
And yes, as you mention, not having a minimum wage would only draw more immigrants over to Britain, which I’m sure you are not in favour of. You cannot just spend retrieved tax from companies profit on border enforcement. What are you suggesting? Army round the borders?! More immigrants will not help British nationals – millions of people survive on having a minimum wage and that is still not enough. Could you survive on something like £17,000 a year if you had a family to support?
You seem to be against everything which is good about Britain. I’m sure you hate the NHS too…