Should There Be a Minimum Wage?
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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
My dictionary says ‘fair’ means “impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination”. But trying to legally entrench benefits for employees over their employers is a form of favoritism. It’s clearly taking sides (no less in a battle among pressure groups the government created in the first place) and not impartial at all.