Robinson wants minimum wage moved to $12,000 per week
The parliamentary Opposition is calling for the minimum wage to be increased to $12,000 per week to “better allow people to meet their basic needs”.
The call was made on Thursday by Opposition spokesman on finance Julian Robinson during his contribution to the 2022/23 Budget Debate.
The minimum wage was increased from $7000 to $9000 per week last month after four years. Robinson believes the increase is not enough.
READ: Gov’t grants 28.5% increase in minimum wage
“I know there are some who will say that the employers of minimum wage earners will not be able to afford these increases as they earn fixed incomes. My answer to that is they may need to reorder their arrangements, where for example, a domestic helper works four days a week instead of five and has the extra day to work somewhere else,” Robinson reasoned.
“Further to that, we want to move away from a minimum wage and instead look at implementing a mechanism to determine a liveable wage,” he added.
Robinson said this should be rooted in an analysis of annual price movements, the inflation rate, and a determination of the basket of goods and services consumed by the lowest earners.
“This analysis should be done annually to protect the most vulnerable workers against the ravages of inflation,” he said.
The Opposition spokesman, who had earlier pointed out that the price of basic food items had increased by more than 40 per cent in some cases between January 2021 and January 2022, said part of the reason why these increases hurt so much is that while everything goes up, most people’s wages and salaries remain the same.
He said even in cases where salaries go up it is not by enough to keep pace with the rate of inflation.
Noting that it took four years to increase the minimum wage, Robinson said “inflation has already eaten it away”.
“I have to ask the Minister [of Finance] directly: How does a single parent pay for food, rent, light, water, transportation, internet on $9000 a week?” he said.
He then took a swipe at Minister without responsibility in the office of the Prime Minister Floyd Green who was last September caught on a viral video at a birthday party on a no-movement day.
“To put it into perspective for my colleagues across the aisle, $9000 cannot even buy one single bottle of the Rosé Champagne that a minister, a councillor, and their colleagues enjoyed during their no-movement day celebrations at the height of the deadly pandemic,” Robinson said.
At the time, Green was the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and resigned from the Cabinet after the video went viral. He was brought back to the executive in a Cabinet reshuffle in January.
As far as Robinson is concerned, “$9000 per week can neither address food poverty nor education inequality. It is a vicious cycle”.
