Mark Paul: Minimum wage, maximum fuss but are we missing the point?

Mark Paul: Minimum wage, maximum fuss but are we missing the point? via IrishTimesBiz

Groups sympathetic to workers argue, loudly, that the Government isn’t doing enough to raise rates. In all likelihood, it will never do enough for them to accept. Meanwhile, groups representing smaller businesses claim, as they always do, that raising the floor on the rate of pay will damage productivity and cost employment. History, and empirical research, shows this is usually not the case.

About 25 years ago, when the debate on introducing a legal minimum rate of pay first raged in this State, it was mostly the employers who tended towards hyperbole. When the initial rate of IR£4.40 was proposed by the Government in 1998, to be introduced two years later, Ibec, the main employer lobby, was reported to have said it was “a strategy for competitive failure, for unemployment, for poverty”. Small business groups predicted disaster.This was all nonsense, of course.

But when Fine Gael and Labour took power shortly afterwards and immediately reversed the cut, businesses again complained loudly about the unfairness of it all. Yet it didn’t cause any damage. The rate started rising again in 2016 and here we are, with the economy effectively at full employment at a minimum rate that will shortly be double the one that was first brought in.

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