'Ensuring employers cover a larger proportion of their workers’ actual living costs does put more pressure onto businesses, but those that will struggle to cover the increased Labour costs were never really viable businesses anyway.'

Are there any viable businesses remaining in this country according to this definition? ie: ones that can stay in profit without relying on subsidies, rents, cannibalising former assets, or unsustainable exploitation of workers or natural resources? I mean, if you do a full accounting there's probably no such thing as a viable business, but plenty of people still depend on the pittances they're able to get from unviable businesses. Should they all be made redundant?

Having previously been in favour of minimum wage increases for many of the reasons cited in the article, 2 years of being self employed and trying to start an independent business gave me a different perspective. For us, minimum wage increases represented an inflationary move of the rest of society which was leaving us further and further behind. It meant all of our costs would rise (because suppliers had to foot a higher wage bill), but we were unable to raise our own prices to match because the value of our product (organic veg) was kept low by the aggressive pricing strategy of the supermarkets & big ag. Compounding this, the big operations hoovered up government subsidies by the billion, while we were eligible for nothing, apart from a vanishingly small number of over-subscribed grants.

You could say this just means the business of small scale organic growing just isn't viable, so it should respond to market forces and ... disappear. This would certainly make for less worker exploitation - or self-exploitation in our case. But given the current state of the jobs market this would inevitably mean more unemployment & dependence on benefits that may or may not be available depending on the whims of the sociopaths-in-charge.

I don't know where this train of thought leads, and I would accept many of the benefits listed by AAV that a minimum wage increase would bring. However it seems too simplistic to say that it's an unqualified good across the board.

cheers,
I

PS: in case anybody wants to know, me & my partner have landed salaried roles working for an estate garden in Scotland, growing veg & flowers. The project still spends more money than it makes - partly due to minimum wage increases for our employment, ironically enough. But at least we're not the ones losing money now!