The issue of minimum wage has once again come up at the
forefront of Maltese politics following the publication of Caritas’ study last
week and its recommendation to increase the minimum wage to €180. The reactions to such study were quite
predictable. On one side you had the
trade unions and the Labour party that agreed with the suggestion of increasing
the minimum wage in Malta. On the other
side you found the employers who blew off the idea by arguing that any increase
would erode Malta’s competitiveness and risk creating inflation in Malta. (The
PN politely said that it would be studying the issue at hand, although we all
know that they do not agree with such a proposal and only said so because they
don’t want to insult Mgr Victor Grech and lose any more potential votes). However, what really riled me up were suggestions
made in certain quarters that by increasing the minimum wage we would not be
helping those people in need but on the contrary we would be creating a society
of bums and lazy people that is content of maintaining its status quo in
mediocrity. By increasing minimum wage, we would essentially be incentivising
people not to improve themselves as they go along with their lives.
Allow me to say that this is total bollocks. The concept of minimum wage is not about giving
hand-outs to lazy people. Minimum wage
is in effect a positive reinforcement of work.
It conveys the message that it pays to work and that you will able to
meet the basic demands of modern life through such work. We are not talking here about living a life
of luxury but rather at having access to bare necessities. The Caritas study
suggests that an increase of the minimum wage is needed not to live a life of
luxury but just to make ends meet and be able to afford the basket of essential
needs consisting of food, clothing, health, personal goods, household
maintenance, education, leisure, transport and housing. By increasing minimum wage one would also in
fact be incentivising people to work. The gap between minimum wage and welfare benefits
must be bigger if we want to encourage more people to join the working force.
This would have positive effects on the finances of the country as by working
they would be contributing to the economic growth of our country and also
reduce the economic burden of social benefits.
Another point that was brought forward is that people should
work hard to improve themselves and their economic situation. Although I do agree with this, one has to
keep in mind that a lot goes into choosing a job apart from financial
considerations. If the only criterion
for job and career selection was money then all of us right now would be trying
to find work in the City. People end up
in low paying jobs for a variety of reasons and under a myriad of different
circumstances and we must accept and respect that fact. Most of the people on
minimum wage also end up working second or third jobs in order to make ends
meet and so can find it quite difficult for them to obtain the necessary skills
to improve.
We also speak of education as being one of the key elements
to ensure a certain level of upward mobility.
By increasing our level of education, people will have a better chance
of finding themselves a better paying job.
Although this shouldn’t be a political issue one must tackle the
elephant in the room that despite having been for the last 25 years under a PN
administration that has constantly patted itself on its back for its
achievements in education, we are still the country with the highest rate of
drop outs following compulsory schooling.
The PN’s educational policy in this regard has crashed and burned and the
sooner we admit that, the easier it will be for us to move forward and look at
how to close this gap.
The idea of a higher minimum wage is something which has to
be looked at not only from a strictly economical perspective. One must look at the social implications that
are brought about by it. A minimum wage
which allows each and every one of us to live a decent life is a very important
step towards creating a fairer society which is not dominated by the top
1%. It is an important step to empower
those people who are living in difficult conditions to be able to afford a
decent living for themselves and their kids and be able to benefit from all the
opportunities that they have to achieve their potential.
