Minimal Wage

No one has said that living on the minimum wage was fun or comfortable. The 25c per hour increase that the National Government has approved will not change that. It barely keeps pace with inflation. But that is not the point of the minimum wage. It is the minimum. It is not meant to be a comfortable wage. It sets the point for the cheapest unskilled labour. That is all it does.

Many would argue that it sets the cost of cheap labour at an artificially high point and that more people could find work if there was no minimum wage. While this is certainly true, my immediate reaction to that would be – why on earth would anyone want to work for less than that? At some point not far below the current minimum wage (and in some cases well above it), the government sets a guaranteed amount for doing absolutely nothing at all. Welfare renders the minimum wage a moot point.

It is for this reason that I find Trevor Mallard’s protestations about the minimum wage, and his member’s bill to raise it to $15 per hour, to be self-serving claptrap. Firstly, Labour has just had nine years of  opportunity, much of it in boom times, to raise the minimum wage to those levels. It is only when they are out of power and unable to access the treasury that they now become so concerned about the minimum wage.  Secondly, even Mallard must know that the only real purpose of the minimum wage is, like the bottom rung of a ladder,  to offer a reason for people to look for something better.

I have yet to meet a minimum wage worker who was not capable of finding a better job, or creating their own business. And I include most of the disabled in that. The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in minimum wage occupations could find better paid work. That they do not do so is a peculiar combination of lack of vision and the Kiwi tendency to “be like folks” (the opposite end of “tall poppy syndrome”). I find it strange that a person on the minimum wage should consider that their “comfort zone” but that really seems to be the way of it. How living on $500 a week (about what I spend on groceries and restaurants/Takeaway) can be “comfortable” is beyond me but apparently it is.

I had the cynical, evil thought the other day that if we closed all the burger joints and chicken franchises we could cure obesity and poverty in the same stroke – no more comfort food.

And Marx thought that religion was the opiate of the masses.

Clearly it is chicken.

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