We do all, of course, want the UK to be a beacon of shining hope in this perilous and depressing world. Therefore we should welcome the claims being made by the Labour Party about its wondrous new minimum wage offer:
… See MoreLabour have promised an immediate pay rise of up to £6,000 for minimum wage workers.
And the party has vowed its ‘real’ living wage would mean at least £9,000 more in the pockets of workers by 2024 than the Tories.
Here’s the latest sob story about how low the minimum wage is. How appallingly the faces of the poor are ground down into the dust by the cackling plutocrats and their running dog lackeys in the corporate offices.
A single mother of six children finds it hard to make ends meet on 20 hours a week of work.
A terror, isn’t it? And I am not joking, not at all. This is the example being trotted out for how the minimum wage simply must be raised:
Dougleshia Nicholson is a single mother of six trying to survive on minimum wage in Kansas City, Missouri.
A new paper out on the effects of the minimum wage. One that I absolutely guarantee will be misunderstood, used to justify that which it doesn’t.
Pleased to announce that our paper quantifying the overall effect of US minimum wages on low-wage jobs is now forthcoming at the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Here’s the current version: https://t.co/noG5yZHsQG pic.twitter.com/UnZlAFlFSv
— Arindrajit Dube (@arindube) April 8, 2019
Top, top, journal, very good researcher – at least one of them is – and the finding is that minimum wages don’t have much unemployment effect if any.…
See MoreThat pro-Europeans are tossers* and socialists are idiots** is well known. Logic therefore dictates that pro-European socialists are idiot tossers and nothing about this proposal for a European minimum wage will persuade anyone otherwise. Because it’s not going to be a minimum wage and it’s not even going to be European. Worse, for the logic of the thing, it’s actually agreeing with the idea that there shouldn’t be a minimum wage at all – for it’s agreeing that there are differences in the minimum wage that should be paid.…
See MoreSure and now we’re against the very idea of a minimum wage around here because we’re economically literate. Humans buy less of things that are more expensive. But even if we put aside logic and reason to enter the minimum wage debate on the more normal terms this decision by Jezza Cobyn is still remarkably stupid and or ignorant. Actually, given modern mores why be so exclusionary? It’s both. For he’s decided that his £10 minimum wage should apply to the under 18s as well.…
See MoreThat Walmart pays low wages is true. That Walmart averages twice the minimum wage is also true. There is no conflict between these two statements either. The thing connecting them being that the mean wage in retail is near twice the minimum wage. Yet retail is also a lowly paid occupation. Given that Walmart is competing in the market for retail workers – it’s the largest such competitor too – then its pay levels are going to be around and about the industry norm.…
See MoreOr at least, coinciding with a rise in the minimum wage in New York City we see an effect upon jobs in the restaurant trade there indistinguishable from a recession. This is not consistent with the idea that minimum wage rises have no effect upon jobs.
There’s a reason we look at restaurants. Some 50% – or so – of those who work in the restaurant trade earn minimum wage. And some 50% of those who earn minimum wage are in the restaurant trade.…
See MoreIt used to be that the “Do you want fries with that?” McJob was the initial prospect of those who left school without much in the way of qualifications. If you like it was a sort of base employment safety net of our high employment economy.
McDonalds actually do try hard to turn raw unskilled but willing input into better workers and do promote as appropriate. They have training courses and their own university and everything.…
See MoreThere is a comforting myth in public policy these days, that raising the minimum wage doesn’t have an effect upon the number of jobs in the economy. This is, sadly for the low paid, a lie. It’s a political lie too. Reality can be found by going and talking to people like Heston Blumenthal. Or even, by just reading newspaper articles about his restaurants:
He may be the nearest thing Britain’s food scene has to an alchemist but that cannot shield Heston Blumenthal from the cold winds blowing across the country’s restaurant business.
It’s a reasonable contention that if the young make more in wages then they’ll nick less stuff in order to impress their paramours. They’ll be able to go and buy the bling that is. The thing about such contentions being that they have to be tested. Is that how it actually works out in a society full of human beings?
The answer being no. As Don Boudreaux points out:
Do minimum wages reduce crime? No – in fact, the opposite seems to be the case.