Britain has one of the world’s highest minimum wages. On April 1st the national living wage will rise again, to £8.21
has gone minimum-wage mad. Left-wing Democrats in America support the “fight for $15” movement, whose goal is to double the federal wage floor. France’sprotesters are also fighting for a higher minimum—and Emmanuel Macron has acquiesced to their demands. Yet Britain is going madder than most. In 2015 the Conservative government rebranded the hourly minimum wage for the over-25s as the “national living wage”, and since then it has risen by 17%, twice as fast as median earnings.
Yet these fears have not come to pass. Even as the rate for the over-25s has risen from 45% of median earnings in 1999 to what will soon be 59%, unemployment has fallen. At 3.9%, it is at its lowest in more than 40 years. The employment rate among working-age people, meanwhile, is at an all-time high. The gains for those at the bottom of the labour market have been real.
How high can it go before the prophecies of doom made in the 1990s come true? It is a theoretical certainty that the employment costs associated with an ever-higher minimum wage will at some point become too much for firms to bear. Already there are signs that companies in labour-intensive industries, such as hairdressing and hospitality, have responded by raising their prices.
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