Minimum wages and inequality

Industrial Relations in Emerging Economies

“…The wages of casual and unskilled workers are regulated by the Minimum Wages Act 1948, which clearly specifies that workers in sectors not covered by collective bargaining are covered by schedules of employment under the Act. However, the criterion for inclusion in the list of scheduled employ-ments is that there should be at least 1000 workers engaged in that activity in that state (Belser and Rani, 2010). The minimum wage rates for each scheduled type of employment are fixed by the appropriate government in its jurisdiction at intervals not exceeding five years.…”

Poverty, employment and inequality in the SDGs: heterodox discourse, orthodox policies?

“…Outcome equity and long-term growth are seen as macro-economic challenges that require institutional solutions to solve coordination problems. Proponents of this view give prominence to the equity-enhancing impact of trade unions and collective bargaining (see Hayter, 2015) and minimum wages (Belser and Rani, 2015). While these affect the primary distribution of incomes, the heterodox frame also stresses the redistributive function of institutions closely intertwined with labour markets, namely social insurance and social assistance mechanisms (see Behrendt and Woodall, 2015;Berg, 2015b).…”

Existence of asymmetry between wages and automatable jobs: a quantile regression approach

“…Although it is valuable to include the entire Malaysian economy in the analysis but considering the same levels of skill required for the labour-intensive industry and capital-intensive industry may lead to biased results. "Cross-industry" effect explains why minimum wage increases have more adverse effects on labour-intensive industries (Belser and Rani, 2015). Therefore, this study only focuses on the manufacturing industry of Malaysia, in particular, the labour-intensive machinery and equipment (M&E) sector.…”