Martin Henry

A couple of laws have been big in the news over recent weeks. They are the Minimum Wage law and the Age of Consent law. Both are ostensibly designed to protect the weak and vulnerable.

But they are both poor pieces of legislation despite their wide international presence. Their wide variability is almost sufficient evidence that they are quite arbitrary constructs and that the well-meaning legislators don't know what they are talking about.

Let's begin with the Minimum Wage law. If wage is the price of labour how else can it be rationally calculated except as a negotiation between buyer and seller, as for other prices, in a market free and fair? It is fear of the unfairness of transactional price setting which drives governments to try and fix the price of labour. But how do they know the correct level at which to set the price?

No employer, in the absence of coercion, can for any period of time continue to offer wages which no worker will take up. And no worker can for any period of time continue to accept a wage which is too low to make going to work more unattractive than not going.

Youth minimum wage

Many countries have, for instance, set a youth minimum wage lower than the adult minimum wage for at least two reasons: To avoid squeezing unskilled and inexperienced youth out of the labour market and on the knowledge that with fewer financial obligations youth may be willing and able to earn less.

But those two arguments must reasonably be open to all workers by choice. And all choices have constraints.

Setting a minimum wage is not only an economically irrational task, since fair price for anything can only be negotiated by seller and buyer acting freely, it has a number of negative consequences upon the very people it is supposed to help most, the poor.

Setting a minimum wage reduces employment, pushing out of the labour market those who for their own reasons may have been willing to work for less.

Some research suggests that a 10 per cent increase in the minimum wage reduces employment among low-skilled workers by as much as three per cent.

Setting a minimum wage has the overall effect of depressing low-end wages as employers use the figure of law as the benchmark for setting wages and show reluctance to pay above it. The negotiating power of the worker is also cramped because 'the law says...' therefore the depressed rate is fair price because it is legal.

What our Government needs to do to offer better protection to the most vulnerable workers is to block any cartelisation of employers to set depressed prices for labour, while at the same time providing training opportunities and economic growth opportunities for higher pay.

The age of consent was upped from 14 to 16 in 1988; and now we are back to wrangling over what it should be to protect innocent little children from sexual exploitation. While legislators and advocates of this and that argue about 'the age', more than a quarter of births are to under-16 girls, sometimes with multiple pregnancies by age 16.

Age of initiation falling

The age of initiation, we are advised, is falling. And there is a plan afoot to 'officially' offer condoms to children under the present age of consent because they are doing it anyway.

The hypocrisy and foolishness of the whole thing.

The law says children who can't vote, and can't drive, and can't be charged for crime as adults can have sex. There is a huge moral dimension to an age of consent which cannot rationally be sidestepped. We have never been much given to marriage. But how can an age of consent be anything lower than the age at which a person can legally enter into a marriage contract. The tacit legal decoupling of sex and marriage can only have the most profound social consequences, wherever. And Jamaica seems to be leading the world in free for all sex and its consequences.