The minimum wage - We will sink or swim together

THE discussion, if you could call it that, over recent days on the prospect, or even the possibility, of cutting the minimum wage gives just a flavour of the great arguments and potential for deep bitterness that lie ahead. Hard choices, as we face ever fewer options, will make for difficult times and fraught, fiery relationships.

For trade unions and so many, many others the minimum wage is an untouchable, a hard-won right that cannot be jettisoned, even if bankruptcy looms. Even if it is 30% higher than the level paid in Britain.

SIPTU president Jack O’Connor went so far as to call for a general election to protect it and other agreements. Talk of reducing the minimum wage was just the latest in a line of “reprehensible remedies” he declared. Mr O’Connor’s position would get considerable support as the vast majority of people working in this country would find it all but impossible to survive on less than €20,000 a year, much less raise a family and house them on such a tight, miserable budget.

Most of us in this relatively wealthy country would be uneasy that fellow citizens might have no more than a subsistence income. As he and his colleague David Begg put it, there is a “decency level” that most of us recognise and would hope and wish to see maintained.

For many others the minimum wage is a millstone around our necks, condemning us to a cold future — excluded, by our own inflexibility, from world markets. We will, they argue, fall further and further behind other, harder economies because we cannot compete with considerably less demanding wage structures.

Already, at least two ministers have challenged the idea that our minimum wage cannot be reconsidered.

Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said yesterday that there is no proposal “as of now” to cut it but that its future should be open to discussion. He pointed out that Ireland has “the second highest” minimum wage in Europe and discussion of a variety of issues is “legitimate” in the current climate.

He echoed a theme offered by Finance Minister Brian Lenihan who said, speaking in Glenties, that if the minimum wage was seen to be an obstacle to job creation then it would have to be addressed.

It is typical of our response to this crisis that we seem to focus on just one minimum wage — the lowest, legal one paid in this country. We have yet to accept that this crisis involves us all and that focussing on one group, even if it is the weakest, most vulnerable, most easily dismissed and worst paid, will not solve our problems.

There are many minimum wage levels in this country.

Most of us work for one in one form or another. Some of them are covered by the registered employment agreements that control pay levels in construction.

Just now Health Minister Mary Harney is at loggerheads with pharmacists over cutting their pay from what they imagine is their proper minimum wage. A whole plethora of minimum wages apply right across the private sector. Benchmarking defined them in the public sector, though no one knows how. Our hospital consultants recently concluded four years of tortuous haggling when they achieved what can only be described as a spectacular minimum wage.

Many professions, dentists, doctors, lawyers and say, architects, charge fees so similar to each other as to suggest that they have collectively identified what they will accept as a minimum.

We have had convictions for price fixing in the motor industry. That illegal practice was set up to guarantee a minimum wage, why else do it?

Farmers complain that powerful food processors collude to keep the prices of farm produce down to below production cost levels. What is that if not protecting a minimum wage or profit for processors?

These are the minimum wages that forced Element Six (E6) to make 370 workers redundant. These are the minimum wages that closed Dell and Waterford Glass, Motorola and Dairygold, not the threadbare figure under discussion over recent days.

By all means let us discuss our minimum wage but let’s discuss all of them. It would be immoral, cowardly and just plain wrong to discuss the €8.65 figure in isolation. It is a part of our problem but by no means anything more than a minor part.

Maybe if we have that discussion, across all boundaries, we might see that very many of us have expectations that have become unrealistic. We might finally see the fantasy, the dishonest, the seductive delusion pedalled by Bertie Ahern and his supporters — and look where they are now — for what it was.

That realisation will bring another. We will understand that we will either sink or swim together and that the solution to this crisis will hit everyone, not just the weakest in our society.