Essay On Minimum Wage In South Africa

Introduction

Should South Africa adopt a minimum wage, there will be a negative influence on employment especially to unskilled workers. According to Ben Stanwix, development policy researcher at the University of Cape Town, the minimum wage policy in post-1994 South Africa has been pursued with the aim of ensuring that workers in low paid and vulnerable occupations are guaranteed a basic subsistence income. The idea was to increase the wage floor so as to lift a portion of the working poor from extreme poverty and facilitate the redistribution of income extremely unequal society.

Background

The first national minimum wage law was enacted by the government of New Zealand in 1984, followed by Australia in 1986 and United Kingdom in 1909. The

When a minimum youth wage is set by the government, it means relative wages for the youth are higher compared to those of adults; this gives firms an incentive to hire adults compared to young labour(O’Higgins:2001). Mashaba the owner of (black like me) product argued that we should be looking at developing the economy and not implementing the national minimum wage and how can you talk about this when South Africa is a country with one of the highest unemployment rates and people go hungry every night. The companies and small enterprises are in the business of making a profit, not overpaying workers. If we force companies to pay high salaries, they will just choose to hire people. The minimum wage has a negative impact in the agricultural industry, because when the clement condition change e.g. drought it can lead to less productivity of goods which will affect the wages of employees and this will lead to decrease in the number of workers or employees which can make productivity to stop manufacturing as the owner is running at a loss not generating profit as its their aim to maximum

GINI index measures the extent to which the distribution of income (or in some cases, consumption expenditure) among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Lorenz curve plots the cumulative percentages of total income received against the cumulative number of recipients, starting with poorest individual or household. The GINI index measures the area between the Lorenz curve and a hypothetical line of absolute equality, expressed as a percentage of the maximum area under the line. Thus a GINI index of 0 represents perfect equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality. This page has the latest values, historical data, forecasts, charts, statistics, an economic calendar and news calendar and news for GINI index in South