Should There Be a Minimum Wage?
Showing only ideas leading to #6142.
See full discussion·See most recent related ideasLog in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.
Wages should be set by workers’ needs, not by market bargaining. Left to the market, wages come out of an unequal contest between employers and workers, so there’s no reason to expect them to be fair. Instead, a fair wage can be worked out from what a worker needs to live decently, then fixed by law.
Justice H. B. Higgins made this argument in the 1907 Harvester judgment, which laid the groundwork for Australia’s basic wage. He rejected leaving pay to the unequal contest of the market and based a fair wage instead on “the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community.”
a fair wage can be worked out from what a worker needs to live decently, then fixed by law
Prices can’t be set by decree. The economy, like a person’s mind, is a creative engine, and prices are its feedback mechanism, much as emotions are for the mind. So you can’t fix a wage by decree any more than a person can just ‘decide’ to be happy.