Teen minimum wage: You wouldn't pay Lamine Yamal €8.89 an hour

Spain's Lamine Yamal receives the trophy for player of the match at the end of Tuesday's semi-final win over France. Photo: AP/Ariel Schalit

Spanish football’s 16-year-old superstar Lamine Yamal is worth a “hell of a lot more than €8.89 an hour”, an Oireachtas Committee heard during arguments against paying teens in Ireland less than the national minimum wage.

People Before Profit TD Mick Barry referenced the teenage Spanish star, who has been lighting up Euro 2024, in a heated series of exchanges at the Oireachtas Enterprise Committee on "discriminatory" sub-minimum rates of the national minimum wage.

Currently, employers can legally pay teenagers below the national minimum wage but unions and some politicians are lobbying for new legislation to abolish this practice. Unions were joined by business groups and the ESRI at the Oireachtas committee to discuss the issue.

The current minimum wage in Ireland is €12.70 an hour but it is legally permissible to pay 19-year-olds €11.43 an hour (90% of the full rate), 18-year-olds €10.16 an hour (80%) and those 17 and under €8.89 an hour (70%).

An ESRI report late last year found that about 15,000 people in Ireland are paid below the minimum wage, which equates to around one in every 140 employees. It found that sub-minimum pay was primarily focused on accommodation/food sectors and the retail sector.

Last month, the Low Pay Commission said that sub-minimum rates should be abolished with the changes taking effect no sooner than January 1, 2025.

The independent statutory body asked by Government to examine this issue found “no justifications” for retaining the current regime where lower minimum wages can be paid to some people “based purely on age alone”.

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Unions and business groups clashed at the committee over issues around collective bargaining and claims around the impact of abolishing the sub-minimum wage rates.

ISME and Retail Excellence Ireland said the recent increase to the national minimum wage along with other rising costs had hit businesses hard, and that abolishing the sub-minimum rates would have a similarly detrimental effect.

Retail Excellence Ireland’s chief executive Jean McCabe said that youth employment could decline if sub-minimum rates were abolished and that more employers are beginning to use sub-minimum rates as a “tool to manage their costs”.

Mandate’s Greg Caffrey, however, said such rates are “deployed far and wide” in the main sectors.

Pay equality

Sinn Féin TD Louise O’Reilly, meanwhile, said that much of the discussion on the topic mirrors the same discourse around equal pay for women. “We now know the world didn’t come to a shuddering halt,” she said.

Her party colleague Senator Paul Gavan also queried why people doing jobs such as serving breakfast in a hotel should be paid a lower rate than a colleague doing the exact same work.

Reference was also made to older workers having more experience and being more productive than teenagers in the workplace as justification for the lower rates for which they are paid.

“There seems to be an assumption that a young worker is not pretty productive, is not very skillful,” Mr Barry said.

“I was watching a young worker yesterday evening, and thought they were doing a very good job. And I’m sure that Yamine Lamal, who plays on the right wing for Spain, will have a great future in his profession.”