An economist has told a conference of human resources managers that the current minimum wage is too high.
'We need to step back from the hurly-burly and see it as a boom-time minimum wage,' said Maynooth University economist Jim O'Leary at CIPD Ireland conference in Dublin.
Dr O'Leary said Ireland's current minimum wage rate at €8.65 an hour was a reflection of 'the essence of the bubble economy which inflated the values of goods, property and labour'.
The economist said his message was 'hugely unpopular' and was bound up with the issue of income distribution. He said that he expected wage differences to narrow and that addressing the minimum wage rate would have to be part of a package which would also address other issues such as those of the well-paid and what he called 'their failure to deliver in recent years'.
CIPD Ireland represents more than 6,300 personnel and training professionals and managers in Ireland.
