minimum wage to go up again - yay!
From March 21st 2005 adult minimum wage will be $9.50 (50c increase) and the youth minimum will go up to $7.40 (40c increase).
I wish they would bring the youth minimum up more, as a step towards getting rid of it all together, but I know that Labour isn't really interested in abolishing it. But this is good news overall :-)
6 comments:
Absolutely. Recent research showed that instead of promoting negative employment effects on young people, rises in the youth minima actually promoted employment among young people.
All I say is, thank God for Labour, because National sure as hell wouldn't be touching the minimum wage with a ten-foot pole except to keep it down and keep their child-labour friends happy.
sorry you're right - $7.60 for 16 and 17 year olds, still a 40c increase though.
my point was that it would have been better if Labour showed a commitment to narrowing the gap by raising the minimum wage for youth by more than the minimum wage for adults. over time we could get to a point where they were the same.
I agree with your comments about $12 an hour (on your blog) but I would like to see it sooner than 2008 (no surprises there). Will be interesting to see what the Maori Party come out with in Feb - rumour was they were talking about a policy of $16 or $17 an hour, which seems a bit absurd to be honest.
Good news, yes, but $9.50 is still obscenely low, let alone $7.40. $16 an hour sounds perfectly reasonable to me. A full time minimum wage job would still only pay a tenth of Helen Clark's annual salary.
i only think $16 is absurd if it's in one step. plus i guess it's relative - $16 today is a lot, $16 in ten year's time not so much.
it's interesting though that business lobby groups seem to have stop bleating about the increases in the minimum wage - i guess you can only cry wolf so many times before it stops getting reported...
oops that was me again.
and another thing - there may be some unionists who would want to keep the minimum wage down but i'd bet if you took a poll of everyone in union, not just the leadership, they would overwhelmingly want the minimum wage raised considerably. unfortunately some unionists are a bit out of touch and although i think that has improved in recent times there's still a long way to go.
I wish they would bring the youth minimum up more, as a step towards getting rid of it altogether, but I know that Labour,
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