Do you really think competent software engineers are going to be the people who need a minimum wage act to be applied to their salaries?

That vast majority of people don't need the minimum wage because the vast majority of people aren't being paid below the minimum wage to start with. The people who the minimum wage 'saves' are the people with least skills and least opportunities. They're the binmen and the cleaners and the waitresses and the shop staff. They're the people whose jobs aren't immediately transferrable to some other country because they're doing the jobs that are there because the people who have money don't want to do those things for themselves. You can't transfer cleaning your house to Nigeria. You can't pay someone to nurse your elderly relative in Saigon if your elderly relative lives in Geneva.

Where there are people, there will be jobs to be done. Some of those jobs will be unappealing, menial, labour intensive and just not very pleasant. The people doing those jobs generally speaking don't have a lot of other options, or they'd be doing one of those other options. Because they are effectively trapped, they are therefore vulnerable to being exploited - by having nasty and unfavourable conditions or wages pushed upon them because they have no other choice.

These are the people the minimum wage act is for. Not software engineers. Not financial analysts. Not Doctors or lawyers. But poor people whose poverty makes them vulnerable to the worst excesses of the people above them who feel it's OK to treat them badly because they have no power.

The idea that those people somehow don't deserve the protection of a just society because, well, apparently because they're too weak to demand it is one I find rather unpleasant. You may differ in your perception of this. But I personally believe we are judged by how the weakest of us are treated, just as much as by how the greatest of us achieve. Would that possibly mean out economy would be less totally productive, that maybe all of us who could afford to be so would be a bit less rich? Maybe. Probably. But if my prosperity is built on the misery of others, I can possibly live with a little less of it.

But the people in the shops selling it may well be. Whether in store or mail order, the prices will reflect the difference in wage of the retailer.

A few shop assistants getting a couple of extra euro an hour? If your shop is taking in so little that that makes enough of a difference to your accounts that you have to majorly alter your prices to deal with it, your business has significantly more issues than a minimum wage directive. There are plenty of other variables in the process of running a retail business - wholesale prices, changing government legislation, floor space rental, seasonal variation etc etc. If changing one variable - staff wages - by a middling degree is enough to send you under, you were in all probability a collapse waiting to happen anyway.

A safe, solid, well run business should have no problem paying it's staff a decent wage.

in 2013 the equivalent swiss minimum wage was ~ £17600 pa for a unskilled worker doing 35 hours going to £27500 is more than a few quid.

Yes, they would have to be over a third more productive (i.e. generating income) to cover the pay raise. For the low margins in places like supermarkets, which in Germany already rely on a lot of "450€ jobs" to fill out their ranks, many would go out of business or raise prices so much that nobody could afford to buy there any more...

(400€ jobs are jobs where you earn a maximum of 450€ a month as a second job, tax free. That also foes for unemployed / job seekers, they can take one of these jobs without affecting their benefits. It is very common among shop workers or manual jobs, which aren't well paid, that the worker will also do a second job to make ends meet or to finance holidays and luxury goods.

When iwas working in Tesco in the 80s there was an accountant filling shelves on the 18:00 to 21:00 shift to help pay off debts.

It's not a pay raise. It's not dependant upon performance or productivity. It's not anything to do with one particular job as oppose to another particular job. There is no relativism involved, no measure against which it must be tested other than whether it is enough to provide for a life without misery. It's the issue of whether a society believes it's right that people, whatever they do, who work a decent week's work should earn enough money to live with dignity and how much is required to provide that dignity.

It's exactly the same issue as asking how much state pension should be. Or whether people should always have access to adequate medical services, regardless of their spending power. Not everything should be defined by how much any given individual will provide in benefit to some corporation or other.

We can argue about how much a minimum wage in any given state should be, that's fair enough. But I simply will not accept that the concept of a minimum wage is somehow damaging to society or us as people. It may be damaging to certain corporate interests, but they've proved themselves massively detrimental to society time and time again. And I value society more than corporations.

It's about how we treat each other as members of a civilised society, NOT about how much 'this random person I don't know' can contribute to my personal wellbeing, either directly or indirectly. It's about being unselfish and caring about each other as human beings. A concept we apparently seem to have lost.

But it ins, in effect, a pay rise. They currently get 17.5K a year and they would get 27.5K afterwards, that is a pay rise and the money to pay for that has to come from somewhere. That either means they have to generate a third more revenue through improved efficiency or throughput or you have to put prices up by the same amount.

So you would probably end up increasing prices by a third to compensate, so people are no better off than before hand.

I don't think anybody has anything against a reasonable minimum wage, but to increase the existing minimum by around a third is well outside inflation and the only way for businesses to compensate for that is either to sack people or out their prices up drastically. If they have to put their prices up by a third, those on minimum wage have gained no advantage and those above minimum wage will be worse off as the cost of living has raised well beyond inflation, so they will want more money and anybody working in export industries will be screwed as they cannot be competitive.

In Germany most industries have negotiated their own minimum wages. There are calls for a blanket minimum wage, but the unions are against it, because it would mean that they have less bargaining power for their members.

Other costs will go up too. In the end all prices, all costs are about wages. When you buy food from Asda, the food itself costs nothing. The costs are Asda wages, logistics wages, manufacturer wages, farmer wages etc etc. If all these go up at once then that could have a large effect on sustainability at the end of the day..... or you'll have to put prices up a lot, which negates the point of the wage in the first place.

In all but a handful of businesses, the contribution of minimum wage workers to the value of the end product is nigh on negligible (thus their wages). Therefore, putting minimum wages up by a third would add nothing like a third to the cost of anything except the cleaning of a specific toilet.

The larger effect is that second and third tier employees need a bigger pay rise to motivate them or compensate them for taking on more responsibility; and companies will have more incentive to buy new gear that allows them to use fewer staff both in menial roles AND in the now more expensive lower regions of management. This is disruptive and causes short term pain, but in the long run it is largely a good thing (for society and economy, for individuals who lose comfy niches, less so).

The only caveat is that you need a dynamic job creating economy to soak up the extra labour, but all the extra investment should help with that. The big risk factor is counterproductive legislation to ward off job losses and forestall that investment. For this reason, studies showing that high minimum wages reduce overall employment are not necessarily worth worrying about too much.

A lot of people who are hard to employ won't get jobs ever again though. A certain slice of the workforce hated learning at school, they hate having to turn up to work, they hate being told what to do, and they think they are being picked on all the time. We use [LIFTED] jobs in firms with high turnover and crap wages to soak up that portion of the workforce*. In a high minimum wage environment those guys would be on government sponsored back-to-work schemes for most of their careers.


* For any who are tempted. I didn't say that everybody on minimum wage is a hopeless looser with an attitude problem, and I will respond with sarcasm if misrepresented.

No - but then I never said that.

Most staff in a software company are not software engineers. Usually, there's a small core of well-paid technical staff, hectored by another small core of not-quite as well-paid managers and then a large helpdesk /support system staffed almost exclusively by lower-level drones and badly-paid secretaries.

A well run business operates with a wage bill around a third of turnover. Roughly. let's say the low end staff make up a third of that wage bill (and the executive and managers make a third, and the technical specialists make a third, because there's less of the latter two groups but they're paid a damn sight more), so the low paid staff's wages should roughly be 1/9th of turnover. Rough 'back of fag packet' calculation, admittedly. If you raise their wages by 10%, you've actually raise the total wage bill by, what, 1.1% of turnover?

If your business is going to have serious issues with a 1.1% increase in it's cost base, you have major problems. If you can't figure out how to manage a 1.1% increase in costs that you'll be told about well in advance, you don't have a business worth speaking of and your executives and managers definitely don't deserve the multiple in wages they're getting over the PFY.

So maybe it's not 1.1%, maybe it's 2%. Same logic applies.You should not be running your business on that sort of knife-edge anyway, and if that didn't get you something else would have soon enough. If you could make the maths look like it's 25% or 50%, then maybe I'll agree that's it's a major factor. But I don't think you can, realistically. Because there's no way your PBI are earning that big a fraction of your turnover to start with.

The minimum wage is not an issue. All of these problems were predicted before the minimum wage was introduced in the UK, and the problems simply never happened. The UK economy continued on it's merry way afterwards. The UK economy wasn't decimated by low paid workers getting a state-enforced increase in wages, it was decimated by highly paid 'valuable' executives and specialists in the financial sector who turned out to actually be utter clowns.

A study at the LSE says