Is £10 an hour a sensible target for the minimum wage?

I was interested to read that the Green Party of England and Wales is proposing that we should immediately raise the minimum wage from the current £6.50 to a living wage (currently £7.65 an hour outside London) and that by 2020 they say that the minimum wage should be £10 an hour.

I am generally in favour of allowing markets to set prices, and at first glance, if someone is prepared to do a job for a certain amount, then it might seem unreasonable to pay them more. But there are good reasons to have a minimum wage at what is, frankly, the very reasonable level suggested as a living wage.

Apart from anything else, if someone is paid less than a living wage, then they end up being supported by the benefit system - so that just means more taxes for the rest of us. If someone is doing a job then they ought to be able to live on the proceeds of a reasonable working week. Anything less is close to concealed slavery. Let's have that living wage now, please, government - and why doesn't it also apply to 18-20 year olds who get a pathetic £5.13 minimum wage at the moment?

However, despite my whole-hearted support for the living wage, I can't support the Green Party policy of a £10 target, as it is entirely arbitrary. There are two suspicious things about it. One is the round number nature of £10. This shouts out that it is a number picked out of the air that sounds impressive because it has two digits. The other is having a target for 2020. Unless the Green Party has a time machine they haven't told us about, that's just too far ahead to make accurate forecasts for. We don't know what inflation will be. We don't know what the economy will be like - and to make a commitment to a specific number seems crazy.

What would be much better, but less attention grabbing than that £10 number, would be to have a target of maintaining the minimum wage at a living wage level, year on year. That would be far more practical and meaningful. And it could mean a minimum wage of more than £10 in 2020 - we can't know, of course, we just know it would be the right amount, where £10 certainly won't be. So how about it Green Party? Can you move away from PR-based politics (the driving force, sadly of most green activity) and do something that really would be a good thing? We shall see.

"Green Party of England and Wales logo" by The logo is from the http://www.greenparty.org.uk/ website.. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of Green Party of England and Wales via Wikipedia

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense

Search This Blog