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Let disabled workers opt out of the minimum wage?

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Henbane
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17 Jun 2011, 6:45 pm

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Downing Street has moved to protect the Prime Minister from a torrent of criticism after a senior Conservative suggested that people with disabilities should be paid less than the minimum wage.

Philip Davies, the MP for Shipley, claimed people with disabilities or mental health problems were at a disadvantage because they could not offer to work for less money.

Relaxing the law would help some disabled people to compete more effectively for jobs in “the real world” in which they are “by definition” less productive than workers without disabilities, he claimed.

The remarks stunned both Labour and Tory MPs and provoked a furious response from charities and equality campaigners, who condemned Mr Davies’s “insulting” suggestion as “absolutely outrageous”.

During a Parliamentary debate, Mr Davies told MPs that the minimum wage of £5.93 per hour meant disabled people who wanted to work found the door being “closed in their face”.

“The people who are most disadvantaged by the national minimum wage are the most vulnerable in society,” he said. “My concern about it is it prevents those people from being given the opportunity to get the first rung on the employment ladder.”


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... -wage.html


What do we think?

Would you be willing to take a job below minimum wage if you couldn't find anything else?

Patronising and undignified? Or a chance to prove yourself?



you_are_what_you_is
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17 Jun 2011, 6:50 pm

I'd abolish minimum wage, so I suppose this would be, in a sense, a step in the right direction.

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blauSamstag
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17 Jun 2011, 6:55 pm

Don't they already do that? With the severely disabled I mean.

I am against abolishing the concept of a minimum wage. There are many, many employers who pay their employees as little as the law explicitly requires and not a cent more, and then on top of that try to pressure their workers into taking unpaid overtime.

And then there are jobs like stripping, where at this point the stripper pays the club for the opportunity to dance for tips.

The national minimum wage does not make a lot of sense. A minimum wage in rural georgia should be a lot lower than a minimum wage in NYC.



Henbane
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17 Jun 2011, 7:01 pm

blauSamstag wrote:
Don't they already do that? With the severely disabled I mean.

I am against abolishing the concept of a minimum wage. There are many, many employers who pay their employees as little as the law explicitly requires and not a cent more, and then on top of that try to pressure their workers into taking unpaid overtime.

And then there are jobs like stripping, where at this point the stripper pays the club for the opportunity to dance for tips.

The national minimum wage does not make a lot of sense. A minimum wage in rural georgia should be a lot lower than a minimum wage in NYC.



In the UK we have a standardised minimum wage across the country, for people over 20. Although businesses in London and nearby areas often pay a London Weighting, reflecting the high cost of living, especially housing, in these areas.



marshall
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17 Jun 2011, 7:03 pm

blauSamstag wrote:
The national minimum wage does not make a lot of sense. A minimum wage in rural georgia should be a lot lower than a minimum wage in NYC.

Yea. Ideally minimum wages should be set locally based on the cost of living.



zer0netgain
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17 Jun 2011, 7:09 pm

I'd sooner beg on the street or go door to door offering to do yard work or clean houses.



Vexcalibur
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17 Jun 2011, 7:21 pm

The only result for this would be making it impossible for disabled workers to ever again work for the minimum wage. IE: Even if your disability does not actually make you less able to perform the job you are applying to, like an accountant with leg paralysis. All the other disabled people applying for the job would destroy their wages bellow minimum to actually get the job, so you, even though your disability doesn't handicap you in that specific job would probably have to destroy your wage as well if you want to be hired.

All in all a dumb bill.


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Last edited by Vexcalibur on 17 Jun 2011, 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

dionysian
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17 Jun 2011, 8:51 pm

No, I don't want to turn disabled people into second class citizens. What the f**k is wrong with people?


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Master_Pedant
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17 Jun 2011, 8:55 pm

blauSamstag wrote:
Don't they already do that? With the severely disabled I mean.


I think what generally happens is that the government subsidizes a portion of their wage.

And I'm against abolishing minimum wage because of the oligopsony or monopsony power firms have.


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pandabear
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17 Jun 2011, 9:13 pm

I'm sure that disabled vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be thrilled.



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17 Jun 2011, 9:25 pm

Master_Pedant wrote:
And I'm against abolishing minimum wage because of the oligopsony or monopsony power firms have.

As markets go, hiring markets are probably relatively competitive. There are more suppliers than demanders, but there are a lot of people demanding things, except for the most narrow niches. Even further, the claim that firms will go hire MORE people because production prices increase doesn't make a lot of sense from a position of the composition of components of production. Any basic notion of capital-labor substitution will hold that if labor is cheaper, it will be more used instead of substituted for capital.

As market oddities go, the oligopsony power really isn't most plausibly the largest issue.



Awesomelyglorious
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17 Jun 2011, 9:34 pm

Vexcalibur wrote:
The only result for this would be making it impossible for disabled workers to ever again work for the minimum wage. IE: Even if your disability does not actually make you less able to perform the job you are applying to, like an accountant with leg paralysis. All the other disabled people applying for the job would destroy their wages bellow minimum to actually get the job, so you, even though your disability doesn't handicap you in that specific job would probably have to destroy your wage as well if you want to be hired.

All in all a dumb bill.

Probably not though. Accountant employees are being competed for among accounting firms. These employees do not share a common labor market with fast food workers, as it isn't as if there are many (perhaps not any) accountants who are inbetween working for KPMG or McDonalds. So, employers aren't going to reason "Hey, I have to do better than McDonalds, but rather they're going to say, "Hey, I have to do better than KPMG, which is not penalized at all for having a disabled worker". So, a change shouldn't RATIONALLY change. (Note: This bill could add a stigma, and a stigma could result in irrational discrimination)

As for jobs where this does matter? Yes, this very well could. So, if you have a disability, McDonalds might only offer a disabled person's wage to simplify hiring decisions, even if there is no negative impact on effectiveness. Note: Even then, this could have no impact. The minimum wage is a price floor, if the bargaining price is above the floor, then there is no reason for a real impact.



SadAspy
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17 Jun 2011, 11:12 pm

If the minimum wage were any lower, it wouldn't be worth my gas and vehicle maintenance to commute to it lol.



Awesomelyglorious
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17 Jun 2011, 11:45 pm

SadAspy wrote:
If the minimum wage were any lower, it wouldn't be worth my gas and vehicle maintenance to commute to it lol.

One reason why companies look at other factors than the minimum wage when setting the wage-rate.



psychohist
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18 Jun 2011, 12:44 am

pandabear wrote:
I'm sure that disabled vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be thrilled.

Disabled vets have pensions in the U.S., so they could actually afford to work for less than most workers. Do they not get pensions in the UK?



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18 Jun 2011, 2:03 pm

It's sort of an interesting idea. I actually just had a woman come into the restaurant I work at trying to convince the owner to create a job for a disabled person for a few hours a week folding boxes or something. The problem is that at this place all of us do a bit of everything, so there really aren't any odd job type tasks that we could hire such a person to do, and certainly not that we'd pay $8.65 an hour for; it simply would not make economic sense for us to do so. Now if we could pay someone less to do less work than we normally get for our minimum hourly wage, than maybe we could make an arrangement, but that's not currently allowed under the law and so we can't be flexible there.


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