National minimum wage increases to £5.80 per hour.
Today's 1.2% increase in the NMW (from £5.73 to £5.80) will be the tenth increase since it was introduced in April 1998.
Over the last decade the NMW has increased by 61.1%, compared to a 52.1% growth in average earnings and a 34.9% increase in the Retail Price Index (excluding housing costs) over the same period.
This is a Labour achievement.
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Although I am no friend of the Labour party, I would certainly agree that the NMW is a very good thing. It is not acceptable to employ people and not pay them at a level which enables them to live and then expect other taxpayers to subsidise this through the tax credits system.
Increasing the NMW simply means that the 2.4 million (or whatever other figure you choose) will find it harder to get work.
Alex
I have to say it: that’s the mantra of the idiot. If only we broke down the ‘stickiness’ of wages all would be well in the economy
Well let’s do it at the top first, shall we?
Richard
Alex
If the low paid work which you and your sweat-shop owner friends seem so keen on won’t feed/house the employees, why should you expect them to do it?
Furthermore, why should those of us who pay taxes subsidise your sweat shops?
@James from Durham
I don’t know any sweat shop owners. I do know a lot of people, particularly young people who earn the minimum wage, and a lot of young people who can’t find interviews, let alone jobs.
Alex
Then promote massive state spending – which is the only way to solve the problem
And which will pay for itself
Your prescription is to add to the queue
Richard
Every individual business wants to pay its workers as little as possible, but it would like every other business to pay its workers as much as possible so they can afford to buy their products. This is the fallacy of composition and why we need a government to square the circle.
National minumum wage
Yes agreed it is an achievement , but is it being complied with in practice? Are there enough resources to police it?
Increasing numbers of people are becoming self employed and quite a few of them do not get the equivalent of the minimum wage – has not this happened under Labour’s watch?
Like all a lot of Labour legislation it looks great, but the effect on the ground is often somewhat different
Although the minimum wage is an achievement in some ways, it is also a trap in relation to regulation of foreign workers from both within and outside of the EU. The European Court of Justice Laval case Dec 2007 established that EU firms bringing in own workers can pay home country wages if there is no minimum wage established in the host country, ‘encouraging’ support for the establishment of one.
However with the lack of legal status of collective bargaining agreements in the UK, the Posted Worker Directive, is only being ‘enforced’, as far as anything that controls business is ‘enforced’ in this country, at the minimum wage level, though to union wage levels in other member states.
That puts all sorts of skilled workers in competition with foreign labour at the minimum wage level.
In addition, wages in many skilled work areas are not unionised but only kept up by limited skills supply. Current UK labour migration regs are not without requirements, but in numerical terms provide for an effectively unlimited skilled (not always that skilled)labour supply. Companies bringing in ‘intracorporate transferees’, the biggest part of UK labour migration, have only that box to tick – the minimum wage.
I also point out that 16% of the global market of temporary staffing agencies is being conducted in the UK – a much bigger % to population than anywhere in the world. What an employment state – even where someone does get a job!
Linda
Agreed – worrying
Richard