Col

How prey tell does someone working 40 hrs a week to keep a roof over the families head get to retrain?

Your simplistic post misses the fact that we need to pay even the "marketable skills challenged" a decent wage. This will allow them to consume, the holy grail of capitalism.

Failure to do this will result in divisions in our society, the cracks are showing already.

Hedgehog “In a decent society these workers deserve a living wage. Got it.”

We all have the right to decide to work or not. We all have the right to decide how much we will work for.

One way for people to improve their earning potential is to improve the skills which they offer.

I would hope you “Got It” that an individuals life is up to the individual and their earning potential is up to how much they are prepared to accept for their labour. A “decent society” does not need to interfere in the private commercial negotiations between employee and employer.

As dear Margaret Thatcher said

“We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state”

By imposing a minimum wage, you are implying the state is, somehow “responsible” for wage rate negotiation, exactly as dear Margaret warns us against.

Steve Madden “How prey tell does someone working 40 hrs a week to keep a roof over the families head get to retrain” simple, do it on the weekends of evenings, just like most of us with tertiary qualifications had to do.

“Failure to do this will result in divisions in our society, the cracks are showing already.”

Hardly a compelling argument for the interdiction of the state.

The real “cracks” start when the winds of change blow against a rigid and immobile structure – the sort of structure which an interfering state builds from all that power which it accumulates from the pleadings of the insecure.

Experience and observation of the rigid economic structures in UK in 1970’s, where socialist government policy was dictated by unionists and payrises were banned in the national interest, displayed how far down the path to a dictatorship a country can travel in just a few years when the weak minded are running it.

Col,

The advice on getting ahead is of course correct so far as an individual is concerned. However, let's suppose everyone took your advice - ignoring the fact that many have IQs that are too low for much formal education or training. The cleaners, nursing home aides and so on would still be needed, and there would still be only so much opportunity at the top. A large population of educated young people who cannot get work or can only get work far below their qualifications leads to organisations like al-Q'aida or the Muslim Brotherhood.

It isn't good for any of us if the people who do the necessary menial work cannot live with dignity or meet their basic needs. My life might be easier if I had a slave, but I don't want it improved on those terms. I don't think that either a minimum wage or government top-ups to market wages is the answer (except in sheltered workshop situations - I agree with Fencepost about the value of work). I would say that we should make our politicians tighten up the labour market: decentralisation for cheaper housing, allowing mothers to work less or not at all if they have babies at home, training our own young people instead of importing skilled migrants or guest workers, an end to mass migration, and so on.

It is worth pointing out that 'lacemaker' was a euphemism for prostitute in Victorian England, because such women were so poorly paid that they often had to supplement their wages in this way.

Kevin Andrews,what this man knows about workers is just a joke,and now further waste of taxpayers money to give him an assitant,yes an assitant perhapds to teach him about workers

Why is it that Singapore has a much higher standard of living than its neighbours? Perhaps it is because the Singapore government has actively pursued the idea of higher wages for everyone rather than cutting the wages to a minimum? If you increase wages (through a higher minimum wage) then you give more people more money to spend which in turn gives more economic activity. Those jobs that are not worth doing because people have to pay too much to employ people will disappear - but so what. The people who are available will be able to be employed on jobs where their salaries are worthwhile. Increasing the minimum wage forces employers to find work that is worth doing for the wage they have to pay.