Locke Keith: Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Locke Keith: Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:629;Page:1416] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party says that youth rates are all about putting down the young people of this country—denigrating them abusing them and treating them as second-class citizens. Like all discrimination it is not based on anything rational—any more than was the wage discrimination of the past against women Maori or any other group. It is based on the self-interest of employers and a certain degree of brainwashing in the population. 
There is a set of myths that to give young people full wages is somehow a cost to the community. One of the myths is that full rates will make it difficult for companies or will bankrupt them. That argument was used against women in the past in order to justify paying them less wages than men. Few people today use that argument in favour of women being paid less than men—they would rightly be called sexist if they did—and the same applies in the case of youth wages: we should call people prejudiced against youth if they justify low youth wages. 
The second myth is that youth rates cause unemployment. That is not true. It is true that there is a higher rate of youth unemployment than in the rest of the population—the figures I saw stood at about 12 percent amongst youth as against roughly 3 percent of the general population; of course in the 1980s and 1990s it was much worse than that. The cause of the difference in the unemployment rate is the way society organises its workforce; the cause is not basic economics. If one looks at it rationally one will see that young people have greater energy alertness and fitness than the rest of the population and that they come out of school with a fairly up-to-date modern education so they are well fit for the workforce. The problems are more about society not properly organising the transition from school into the workforce for 16 and 17-year-olds. Certainly young people lack one thing and that is work experience but when one thinks about it one will realise that youth rates are applied not to jobs that require a huge amount of experience but to relatively low-skilled jobs that people can get to know pretty quickly. So it is not an economic argument. As Sue Bradford pointed out if we want people to be highly skilled and advancing through the education system—often 16 and 17-year-olds do part-time work when in full-time education and sometimes they do full-time work and go to night classes or whatever—then we need them to be paid properly so that they can afford to go through that education in order to add value to our workforce as they grow older—as 18-year-olds 19-year-olds and beyond. 
If one looks at economics on the level of the individual company one sees that few companies would fail to survive if they paid young people a full rate. In fact productivity actually goes up if people are paid decently and they are not hanging around feeling sullen about their low wages and the exploitation they are suffering. The argument that companies put to groups like Unite! which organises young workers is essentially that companies are in a competitive market particularly in industries like fast-food outlets and supermarkets where young people are employed—and McDonald’s brought in youth rates only a couple of years ago—and they could not compete with the other fast-food outlets or supermarkets if they did not pay youth rates. So some of those employers actually favour having a higher minimum wage so that they could compete on a level basis; that is if they are paying decent wages to their workers they are not having to compete against other firms paying exploitation wages. 
I think that the other reason for decent wages too is that we do not want young people—16 and 17-year-olds—growing up too dependent on their parents. If we are looking to the future we want them to be well-paid confident independent people and we see some of those people today. At 6 o’clock today the KFC youth workers went on strike to end youth wages and to get decent wages in their industry. The strike was organised by Unite! and we fully support them in that action.