HR managers hear call to axe minimum wage
Conference and Expo 2009 - press release
11 May 2009
HR managers told it’s time to cut minimum wage from €8.65 an hour
The current minimum wage 'is too high at its current rate and we need to step back from the hurly-burly and see it as a boom-time minimum wage,' the country’s top HR managers were told yesterday.
Over 700 managers at the CIPD annual conference in Dublin heard that Ireland’s current minimum wage rate at €8.65 an hour was a reflection of 'the essence of the bubble economy which inflated the values of goods, property and labour', according to Maynooth University economist, Jim O’Leary.
'The minimum wage moved out of kilter with the economy and it was a boom-time minimum wage and reflected other dimensions of the boom', he added.
Dr O’Leary added that 'it is a hugely unpopular message to propagate and it is bound up with issues if income distribution'. He said that he expected wage differentials to narrow and that addressing the minimum wage rate would have to be part of a package which would also address other issues such as those of the well-paid and their failure to deliver in recent years.
He added that unemployment in absolute numbers on the Live Register later this year will be at its highest level ever in the history of the state. The conference in Dublin’s Burlington Hotel was told that, as the gap between unemployment rates in Ireland and Britain reaches about 7% by late next year, we may see a release valve with recent immigrants and Irish workers moving to take up jobs in Britain.