Disability Wage

I'm a little late to the party but would still like to weigh in my two cents on the disabled minimum wage hoo-har.  Personally I totally understand where Philip Davies is coming from, he raises an important point which not only affects the disabled but also traps young & unskilled workers in the unemployment cycle.  Labour's typical equality at any price response didn't surprise me (or anyone else I expect) but the response from "Conservative" MP Edward Leigh was much more surprising.

"Why actually should a disabled person work for less than £5.93 an hour. It is not a lot of money, is it?"

I guess this quote perfectly demonstrate the slightly different shades of red we get to vote for in the UK, politics is now all about who to redistribute to rather than whether we should even be redistributing.  But more importantly, Edward is so detached from reality that he would rather tax and steal from most of the population just to avoid subjecting a few people to what some would consider an "undesirable wage" (if such a thing exists, try saying that to a third world worker).  After all £3 an hour is still better than starving, but I guess benefits are even better if you don't have to lift a finger.

Before we go any further I would like to address the politically correct crowd who are no doubt lurking in the shadows somewhere.  The "disabled people deserve the same wage an an able bodied person" is fine providing they are as good a worker as the able bodied person (the same argument applies to the feminists and affirmative action crowd too).  In other words is their labour as valuable?  For some disabled people it is, but the minimum wage doesn't affect the skilled workers, a wheelchair-bound lawyer for example has no problem practising law compared with his able bodied contemporaries.  However a one-armed individual who screws bulbs into lamps for a living may not be as efficient as his two armed co-workers.  So by forcing the employer to pay him a wage worth more than his labour can produce the company is loosing money and would eventually go out of business, the only choice is to fire the disabled worker.  This isn't pleasant but is a fact of life so the PC crowds opinion holds no weight here as it is economically un-viable.  The best solution which allows the disabled man to keep his job is to pay him a wage more aligned to the value of his labour.

Everybody hopefully understands that by enacting a minimum wage labourers who skills are valued below that price cannot enter the market, they therefore cannot gain skills to move up the employment ladder and hence become trapped in poverty.  To address this newly government created injustice we "grant" the now unemployed individuals benefits so that they can survive.  Eventually the do-gooders identify that the disabled people can't seem to find work (totally neglecting the fact that the minimum wage is stopping employers from hiring them) and bump up the benefits further to ensure a more fair & equal living standard for the unemployed disabled populace.  We've now reached the stage where earning less than the minimum wage is considered totally despicable & people often get offended if you suggest that disabled people should be allowed to earn what they are worth.

What annoys me most about this case (even more than the PC bullshit) is that the minimum wage doesn't even help to secure equality or a good standard of living for the disabled, yet we all pay the price for this failure.  By leaving disabled people with no choice but to take benefits they are not improving their workplace skills & thus will never be able to get over the initial minimum labour value hurdle.  Instead they will spend their lives dependant on handouts from Joe-pubic rather than improving themselves and moving on to bigger and better things.  The potential life prospects that have been wasted simply by being denied the opportunity to work is a far bigger injustice.

Further more the benefits are paid for by the rest of the public; draining resources from the economy (which could be invested in more jobs to help employ people of low labour value), decreasing individual spending power (thereby depriving other disabled and ordinary people of employment) and further increasing the cost of employment, courtesy of taxation, which deprives even more low skilled workers of potential life prospects.

The minimum wage, for both able bodied & disabled people, has and continues to create generations of welfare dependant, prospect deprived individuals with little more to look forward to than the next government cheque.  At the same time this injustice not only damages the lives of the dependant, but also deprives the working populace of their earnings and potential economic innovations which improve the lives of the whole country.  Three cheers for socialism.