Tagged with Minimum wage

You can’t de-politicise the minimum wage

cashJulia Unwin’s article in Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper this week would be laughable if it was not also symptomatic of a wider problem. Julia is the Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust and this week she took to the pages of the national newspaper to chide the leader of the Labour party pronouncing that “Milliband should not meddle in the minimum wage”.

Julia is a career long quangocrat. Amongst the organisations she has adorned are: the Food Standards Agency: the National Consumer Council; the Housing Corporation and the Charity Commission. Julia Unwin CBE has never done a minimum wage job in her life and she has obviously grown weary of dealing with the people who ordinary people elect to represent them. As far as she is concerned quangocrats know best. Continue reading →

Why Britain needs a pay rise

payriselogoTomorrow the TUC demonstration will be highlighting why Britain needs a pay rise. The extent to which people’s living standards have dropped is greater than ever before.

I was shocked when a Unite bus driver told me how every month his wife’s parents have to give them £200 to be able to pay their rent and it is common practise for bus drivers to be on benefits. Paul and his members are not shirkers or skivers and yet these are the people under attack from cuts and austerity.

Recently I have been to many Unite sector committees talking about the need to vote Labour at the General Election. What comes up time and time again is that although they won’t vote Tory there is no enthusiasm to vote Labour. Everyone is being affected by lower wages, attacks on working conditions, job insecurity, housing costs, and a higher cost of living. And yet they do not believe that Labour is the answer to the cost of living crisis. Continue reading →

What Tories really think of the minimum wage

David Cameron’s welfare minister has advocated treating those most in need differently by paying them below the national minimum wage. Lord David Freud, talking amongst friends at Conservative Party Conference, said he thought there was “a group” of disabled people who are “not worth the full wage”. Lord Freud is not the only Conservative seeking to undermine the minimum wage:

In 2012, Andrea Leadsom said that businesses with three employees and fewer should be exempt from minimum wage, as well as regulation like maternity and paternity rights. Leadsom said:

I genuinely think we do need to do more for growth . . . above all we have to focus on deregulation.” She continued: “No minimum wage; no unfair dismissal; no maternity or paternity rights; no national insurance or employer pension contributions; a flat rate of tax; no red tape.”

Continue reading →

Germans to get ‘amputated’ minimum wage

8144409_sThe German parliament this week approved the country’s first minimum wage but unions and critics on the Left are not much impressed. The wage – backed by a vote in the Bundestag on Thursday – will be set at €8.50 (£6.80) per hour, which is higher than the equivalent in the US and UK.

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats approved the new policy as part of a power-sharing deal with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Germany has previously left it to trade unions and business groups to fix minimum pay instead. The country is currently one of seven in the 28-nation EU without a minimum wage level. Continue reading →

Miliband’s linking minimum wage to earnings could benefit up to 5m low-paid

PeanutLow pay in Britain is scandalous, and it has got considerably lower since 2010. Low pay is conventionally defined as the number of workers paid less than the Living Wage of £7.45 per hour outside London and £8.80 in London, and on that basis workers on low pay have increased by almost 2 millions since the last election. In 2010 there were 3.4 million paid below that level, and now it is 5.2 million, which represents 1 in 5 of all workers and 1 in 3 of all women at work.

But what makes matters a lot worse is that these very low rates of pay are not linked to a moving upper threshold, and are therefore stuck at the bottom of the wage pyramid until raised by some minuscule amount in an opaque administrative process influenced by the CBI. Thus it is proposed to increase the minimum wage later this year from £6.31 an hour to £6.50. Another major flaw in this current system is that, even if it is raised by these tiny amounts, many employers simply ignore it and there is a wholly inadequate number of wages inspectors to enforce it and derisory penalties imposed even in the rare cases where employers are booked. Continue reading →