Another Reason why minimum wage increases don't matter to job growth - Average wages are growing faster!

Further to the previous post

I calculated the minimum wage growing at around 3.5% a year from 1997-2012. Not bad.

But when you look at the Salaries and wages out of the ATO tax statistics, you have the average wages per tax payer growing at 4.5% a year over the same period.

So clearly, it's not minimum wags responsible for job growth. Which sort of makes sense. Generally, business do not want to hire minimum wage workers, especially in an advanced economy. Minimum wage workers are people with low bargaining power; i.e the elderly, young, uneducated, disabled or immigrants performing "grunt" jobs, jobs that don't require a lot of thinking or automomy...clearly jobs that a lot of people don't want. Also, this type of job is on the decline as automation and IT self service systems replace the jobs so there are not enough of them (last count I have seen is less than 10% of the workforce) to really influence job growth statistics.

Generally, you want people who can add value to your business, and these people come with a premium; one that business is usually happy to pay as they add more value than that premium to the business.