An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

The $3 in­crease in the min­i­mum wage, set to come in­to ef­fect on Jan­u­ary 1, 2024, is seen by the Gov­ern­ment as the “sweet spot” in ad­dress­ing the con­cerns of both busi­ness­es and work­ers.

Speak­ing dur­ing CNC3’s Ease or Squeeze Bud­get 2024 dis­cus­sion on Mon­day night, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said the Gov­ern­ment ad­just­ed while con­sid­er­ing that any greater in­crease could have seen the cost of liv­ing af­fect­ed fur­ther.

“Some union lead­ers were ask­ing for $30. What does it do to the small­er busi­ness­es? What does it do to the cost of all the prod­ucts that they’re sell­ing? For ex­am­ple, a bak­ery will not just in­crease the cost of the prod­ucts they’re sell­ing, etc. So it’s a bal­anc­ing act,” said Young.

He ex­plained that the Gov­ern­ment felt the in­crease, which would see min­i­mum-wage work­ers earn $24 more for the eight hours worked, or $480 more for a 20-day work month, was the best com­pro­mise.

“That is the sweet spot that we came to ... $20.50,” said Young.
“It’s go­ing to help an es­ti­mat­ed 200,000 peo­ple in our so­ci­ety by rais­ing their ca­pac­i­ty by a few $100 ex­tra in their pock­ets, which is go­ing to make a huge dif­fer­ence. But it’s not too high that it puts in­to play where busi­ness­es are now jus­ti­fied in rais­ing the price and the prod­uct they’re sell­ing. So that is the spot that we found.”

Econ­o­mist Mar­lene Attz, who was part of the pan­el and asked if a pay­ment plan for util­i­ties could be in­tro­duced for small and mi­cro en­ter­pris­es who would now face these ex­pens­es, said, “While I sup­port the in­crease in the min­i­mum wage be­cause I think it is al­most un­con­scionable that peo­ple were liv­ing on $2,000 or $2,800 a month as the case may be, I think we have to look at the wider set of is­sues, and es­sen­tial­ly the domi­no im­pact of this mea­sure that peo­ple have been putting in place. If it is, we’re lay­er­ing on top of the ad­di­tion­al labour costs, util­i­ty costs, etc, I think then, it could be the ques­tion that you raised ear­li­er, the sup­port to some of these busi­ness­es, I think, will be sig­nif­i­cant, but par­tic­u­lar­ly the mi­cro-busi­ness­es.”

For­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Mar­i­ano Browne had a mixed view on the ad­just­ment, as he was not cer­tain just how many peo­ple would ben­e­fit from it, not­ing it was main­ly se­cu­ri­ty firms that paid min­i­mum wage to work­ers.

Econ­o­mist Dr Ronald Ramkissoon said while the group that earned min­i­mum wage should be hap­py with the news, he hoped there would be more done to move them out of that eco­nom­ic brack­et.

“The idea of the min­i­mum wage, I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly like it, I would like peo­ple be­ing trained up and peo­ple be­ing trained to ac­cess the kinds of jobs the econ­o­my is pro­duc­ing. Okay, but let’s say we have a stage where we have this min­i­mum wage, what busi­ness­es want to do, for ex­am­ple, is to look at how they would mech­a­nise how they would do things dif­fer­ent­ly with less labour,” he said.

“Now, that is, in a sense, a neg­a­tive thing, be­cause it’s less em­ploy­ment. On the oth­er hand, busi­ness­es need to do busi­ness and there­fore they need to look to see how they can in­crease more cap­i­tal or I can use cer­tain kinds of op­er­a­tions which will lead me to con­tin­ue to do busi­ness. So those are some of my com­ments on that. But at the end of the day, I think we must en­sure that peo­ple are trained to earn a much high­er in­come than min­i­mum wage.”

Im­bert hap­py to help peo­ple at low­est end

of in­come scale

In a Twit­ter post yes­ter­day, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said he was hap­py to fi­nal­ly be able, af­ter eight years of eco­nom­ic strain, to present a bud­get with no new tax­es or in­creas­es and in­stead to be able to help peo­ple at the low­est end of the in­come scale with a $3 in­crease in the min­i­mum wage, $1,000 book grant, and $1 bil­lion in back­pay.