Case Study: National Minimum Wage

Next, are jobs low-paid because workers are low skilled and have low productivity? The fact that today’s low-wage workers in the US are more educated, with 41% having at least some college qualifications, up from 29% in 2000 implied that low-paid jobs are not attributed to low-skilled or low productivity (The New York times, March 16, 2014; Bosch, 2009).

Finally, the question about whether raising wages would lead to job loss has two schools of thought which we re-visit in the later section.

In the next section, we would explore the policy interventions of standard setting and programmes to help firms. The three institutions for standard settings are National Minimum Wage (NMW), collective bargaining and welfare institutions.

NMW can be used

For example, in a particular case-study on an industrial district in the Riviera del Brenta area of Veneto Itay, which produces footwear since 1898, this industrial district had successfully transformed from a traditional cottage industry into a sustainable skill ecosystem (Froy et al, 2012).

The key factors that lead to the success of creating a sustainable skill ecosystem are the Interconnected web of contextually and mutually reinforcing factors that nurture the ecosystem, and codification of knowledge in this craft industry to build a private institute to train managers and workers of all skill levels required by the footwear industry (Froy et al, 2012).

Challenges in implementing policy interventions in the SMEs sector to limit low-wage jobs and creating better and productive

This tripartite partnership between the government agencies, employers associations and trade unions will bring together all the actors capable of identifying problems in the world of work and find possible solutions to them. The Government will ensure that the views of the major social partners are reflected in the policies and laws formulated. The tripartite partnership approach has since served as the platform for collective bargaining (Hing & Lansbury, 2008; Wong, 2000).

For decades, strong economic growth and full employment have raised wages and welfare, but since 1998, median earnings have started to stagnate. Along with rising income inequality and high incidence of a low-wage job, policymakers were concerned with its social policies and explore ways to tweak the social safety nets to limit low-wage work. Henceforth, the policy challenge is to ensure that any tweaking of the social safety nets has to be done in the way that maximises work incentives, upward mobility and dignity (Poh, 2007; Yeoh,