Hamish Champ: The National Minimum Wage. Useful socio/economic tool or commercial burden?

Last week I received an email newsletter from the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers (ALMR) which caught my eye. Not literally, you understand, like a fish hook, but it had almost the same impact.

The communiqué highlighted the new National Minimum Wage (NMW) rate of £5.73 an hour for adults, £4.77 for 18 to 21 year olds and £3.53 for young 'uns. The ALMR doesn't like the NMW, it seems.

I accept that a mandatorily set minimum wage, one dictated to employers by the government, is seen as state meddling in the commercial world.

Why shouldn't businesses be able to set their own levels and rates of pay, people ask? Why not allow them to be competitive and able buck a trend here and there, paying what they deem appropriate, even above the NMW rate as circumstances allow?

It's a fair question, up to a point. If a company can be… flexible in the wages department it might be able to employ more people, I suppose. Equally I guess many people accept working for NMW - although perhaps their economic circumstances mean it's the best they can hope for.

Many companies doubtless use the fact that they pay their staff over and above the NMW to send out a message that they are progressive employers. And progressive pay policies, rewarding those who strive to achieve better results, presumably means better recruitment opportunities, greater career satisfaction, etc, etc.

But at its most basic level, The System is such that owners want to pay their people as little as possible, while the workers want to get as much as they can.

The thing is, we're not living in the mid-19th Century, despite some people's hankering after the so-called values of the Victorian age. Even at the new NMW rate for grown-ups, it can't be a bundle of laughs trying to get by on £200 a week before tax.

I know where the ALMR is coming from, but when I see it saying stuff like "Help us to keep the NMW for 2009/10 as low as possible" I feel rather queasy.

Onerous cost or not, baulking at the NMW in this way appears positively Dickensian.

I'm not urging a higher rate. But in such testing economic times as the ones we now find ourselves those people calling for restraint for the least-well off could do so with a little more sensitivity.