By Coco Khan, Illustration: Lalalimola/The Guardian, The Guardian, May 13, 2022
When P&O sacked 800 of its workers with the intention of replacing them with agency staff, including foreign workers allegedly paid less than minimum wage, it sparked an outcry. As businesses become more global, shouldn’t workers’ rights, too? I asked Jason Hickel, economic anthropologist and visiting senior fellow at LSE, if it’s time for a global minimum wage.
Am I right in thinking that when people discuss the global minimum wage, they’re not saying everyone on the planet should be paid the same?
That’s correct. Some people propose setting it at 50% of each country’s median income. Others, and this is my preferred option, propose that it should be pegged to decent living standards in each country. So whatever is required to access good housing, healthcare, education, water, electricity, internet and so on.
Right, because if you don’t peg it to living standards you get what we have in the UK: one in six working households in poverty. Could a global minimum wage lift the floor for Britons, too?
Yes, it would eliminate working poverty in rich countries as well as poorer countries. It may also help reduce excess material consumption in the global north, because without extreme labour exploitation consumer goods would be closer to their true cost. Shifting purchasing power from rich to poor, while guaranteeing decent living standards – that’s a gain for workers and ecology.
Comments (0)