This is one last attempt to ask the government to call off tomorrow’s increase in the minimum wage.

If it goes through tomorrow, the government will not be able to say that they did everything they possibly could to help this economy survive this crisis

This increase is huge.  It’s $1.20 an hour.

There’s a good chance it will cost us jobs in the long run.

Even the OECD warned the government to slow the increases down because it could cost jobs.

The government’s own advice from officials released this year shows it will cost us as many as 7500 jobs that are never created, because they’re too expensive.

Remember, we’re not just counting tomorrow’s increase.  This will be the third hike in the minimum wage in two years.  Tomorrow it will be $3.15 an hour higher than two years ago.

Yes, of course people at the bottom end should earn more, but right now is not the time.

We are in an economic crisis like none of us have ever seen before. We are facing predictions on the high side of as many as 30% unemployment.

When you have numbers like that, when you have jobs being cut by their thousands, the very last thing you do is raise wages. It doesn’t make any economic sense.

This is bloody-mindedness from the government. It’s a political decision to fulfil a promise to a voting base.

But it’s not clever, because there are better and smarter ways of doing what you promised by not doing it right now.

Defer it for six months. Backdate it if you want to  Have they even thought of those options?

Have they thought about the consequences of incentivising employers to break the rules?  Because surely if an employer says to an employee “it’s the minimum wage increase or your job”, the employee will pick the job.

When we’re through the worst of Covid-19, and we look back and assess the carnage this has caused us economically, and we see that tomorrow’s minimum wage increase made the recovery worse, this government will not be able to say they did their best to get us through economically.