fatvegan

The cover story of today's Australian is about the minimum wage and some of Ian Harper's thoughts on the subject. He's worried that linking maternity leave pay levels to the minimum wage will be a disaster because middle-income mums would have to survive on working class money. He doesn't want to have any more people with a vested interest in the level of the minimum wage. It's hard enough convincing the working class they aren't getting a bum deal, but if you have to start persuading everyone else you'll have no chance.

It doubles the constituency of people with a vested interest in the minimum wage from 150,000 to 300,000. Now half of them are low-paid people. The other half would be saying: 'How can I pay for all this baby gear on this miserable wage?'

Our concern is what this does is conflate, to confuse, two policy objectives which are very, very different. Some of those mothers will be low-paid but many aren't.

I still get surprised sometimes that folk can come out and say shit like this without any sense of self-consciousness. For Ian Harper, the thought that high-income mums might have to make do on minimum wage for what he calls a "brief period", truly is a horror.