The 2024 Labour Manifesto is now online!
I am genuinely excited by loads of it, especially the green policies and the expansion of workers’ rights, but probably the most important part of it is the stuff aimed at economic growth.
What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Inspired to volunteer? Some more sensible, moderate emotion?
“Labour will also remove the discriminatory age bands, so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage, delivering a pay rise to hundreds of thousands of workers across the UK.”
I like this change, shame it wasn’t in place when I was younger!
My concern with this is that for a lot of young people retail is their first job, and so I suspect retail is predominantly young workers. What kind of impact would this have on the economy? E.g. if Morrisons hires lots of younger people and they now need to increase all their pays, I’m guessing they’ll need to cut staff numbers or increase prices? Of course they are going to avoid cutting into their profits. Now times this by however many retailers there are. I can only guess there is the hope that people will buy more.
This was also a concern when the minimum wage was introduced, but it never materialised. Hopefully that will be the case this time, too, but I suppose we’ll have to see.
As someone who works in Morrisons this wouldn’t actually be the case. They pay everyone the highest level of minimum wage already so this wouldn’t be a change. I know they aren’t the only company that pays everyone the 21+ minimum wage
Another potential problem with this policy is that it could end up leading to fewer younger people being taken on in these sort of roles.
If they’ve got to pay them the same amount as someone who is more experienced and would require less training, why would they opt for hiring the younger ones? This is partly the reason the policy is what it is now.
That’s an interesting take on “Young people won’t be exploited as much”.