Monday, June 25, 2012

Forget about Minimum Wage for now

Was listening to this in the car this morning. Very interesting! I especially like how the MD of ISS (Mr. Wun I think) responded to questions: short and straight to the point. You know he wasn't handling it in the typically PR way. I wished but of course this is a naive position that government leaders would do the same.

Several callers called in suggesting that we ought to implement a minimum wage system. The text book answer now is that we do not know how to do it properly.

My take? I realized we may be the only country with the administrative capability to do better than using a minimum wage policy. We can narrowly cast and target our solutions. The cleaning industry is the first sector to be addressed. Clearly the need to raise cleaners pay is the greatest.

I haven't heard anyone talking about how we can roll back a minimum wage policy if it fails. I think it is really hard to do that.

Let's put minimum wage on the shelf for now. The targeted approach is also helping us get a better grasp what a minimum wage should be if proven we needed one in the end.

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