Dr. Laura Bambrick:

The way we see whether a minimum wage is adequate relates not to price but to the percentage of income in the workforce. As I set out in my opening statement, we have not kept pace with that. We started at 66% of the median wage and over time we have dipped as far as below 45%. We are back at 52% but the 80 cent will bring us down to 51%, so we will be back down further. We do not peg the minimum wage to prices but rather to other wages in the economy. This is a better barometer of how much people will have to spend on the cost of living in that economy, and over time the value of the minimum wage related to wages in the economy has rapidly declined. It is not like index-linking in social welfare, where it is indexed either to wages or to prices. With the minimum wage, it is just about wages.