Effects of the minimum wage on the jobs market

Tom McDonnell: TASC made a short submission last week to the Labour Court review of the JLC wage agreement mechanisms. The submission is available here.

The Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation published a report in February on actions to address youth and long-term unemployment. It can be found here. One of the recommendations (Number 26) states that there should be an investigation into the effects of the minimum wage (both positive and negative) on the jobs market. This is a sensible recommendation. The independent Low Pay Commission (LPC) in the United Kingdom does this every year. What does the evidence suggest?;

The LPC's 2012 Annual Report is here and their discussion of the minimum wage's impact on the UK's labour market begins on page 48 of the pdf. They state that: The general consensus...is that the NMW (i.e, the national minimum wage) has not significantly affected employment . 

Both the theoretical and empirical literature are ambiguous concerning the impacts on employment. While the standard competitive model suggests there should be a negative effect on the jobs market, institutional models and dynamic monopsony models both suggest that the effect is actually much less clear cut. Increased aggregate demand and reduced search costs are just two reasons why the effect on net employment might be minimal or non-existent. Recent empirical work suggests minimum wage have little or no overall effect. See for example this study by Arindajit Dube, William Lester and Michael Reich.

John Schmitt asks why the minimum wage appears to have 'no discernible effect' on the minimum wage here while Barry Hirsch, Bruce Kaufman and Tatyana Zelenska try and explain the lack of effect on employment here through the framework of differing 'channels of adjustment'.

While innovative solutions to the jobs crisis are needed, reduced levels for wage floors are unlikely to be helpful in reducing unemployment. The major effects would likely be to increase financial hardship and vulnerability for low wage workers, and increasing income inequality, without any meaningful impact on overall employment.