ronin - 4:06 pm on Nov 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

How do people survive on Minimum Wage?

By living a pretty spartan life.

Minimum wage is the lowest legal amount an employer is allowed to pay an employee for a job and so in an ideal society where there are plenty of job opportunities it would only be accepted by those who need to work a little bit to make ends meet but otherwise have other priorities (they may be full time students or they may be aspiring musicians or artists or writers).

You might consider living a spartan life to be acceptable when you're going to be a rich and famous artiste or when you're studying hard for an academic or vocational qualification, but it's not really acceptable when the job is not a compromise to achieve one of your more important priorities, but actually your job.

One of the fastest way to solve the issues I can think of is for governments, NGOs and internationalist organisations to encourage and sponsor lots of entrepreneurialism so that the number of employers increases, workers have more choice of who they want to work for and the employment-quality bar is raised across the board.

At the same time employers need to promote a culture of being employers not being exploiters. I'm not a Christian but I think the 19th century Quaker industrialists and social reformers like John Cadbury and Joseph Rowntree hold up an exemplary model.