Minimum Wage In Australia

Table 1 shows that across the workforce, 22.4% of workers are earning the minimum wage. It is important to note that decisions by the Fair Work Commission affect not only minimum wage workers but also indirectly affect those who are in the percentiles above minimum wage as they will expect similar increases to preserve relativities and to allow them to keep pace with wage growth.
Table 1 also shows that 63.4 % of all minimum wage works are female and 42% of all workers on the minimum wage were married. One could infer that for a large proportion of minimum wage workers the minimum wage may be a secondary income and supplementing a household income. Research by Levin-Waldman (2009) supports this and shows that quite often those in the minimum wage market are …show more content…
If we combine all minimum wage workers in the 16-25 year old bracket, over 50% are in the minimum wage category (Even and Macpherson, 2003). Any increase in the minimum wage is going to impact this category of employees. They could experience increased unemployment. The current unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds in Australia is 13% (ABS, July 2017) while the unemployment rate for the whole population is 5.6% (ABS, July 2017). This is a massive difference and indicates an issue which needs to be investigated as perhaps the minimum wage may be having an adverse effect on this group of employees. The other potential area of impact is training. A reduction in training means this group of employees struggles to move out of minimum wage employment. Based on these figures one can conclude that while minimum wage increases may assist employees in the short run. In the long run education and training is the key to moving away from these minimum wage jobs. The issue then becomes that the minimum wage itself hinders employment opportunities and training opportunities as employers react to the increased costs in their