MeanUncleBuck

Too many of you are only looking at this from one point of view, the employee that makes the minimum wage. If I own a company and there is no minimum wage I can pay my employees what I think they are with and deserve based upon my revenues. Now suppose I pay worker A 550 baht/day and worker B only 300/day because he does not work as hard or as well as A. Suddenly the government imposes a 400 baht/day minimum wage; my wages have increased but my revenues have not. In order to pay all my workers who are currently making less than 400 baht/day I will likely have to cut the pay of the workers making more than the minimum to be able to keep costs the same. How are those workers going to feel about making less so that the workers that do less get more money? The other side of this is that I fire some of the weaker workers so I can maintain my current payroll which means I how employ fewer workers and the fired ones have no income.

Your good intentions of providing everyone with a basic standard of living isn't helping those fired workers, is it? I am sure they would be happy with the wage they were making before the government inserted it's nose into their business.

It is not the government's responsibility to ensure that anyone receives a wage that provides a basic standard of living; it is your responsibility plain and simple. If you think the government should make sure you can live on the money you make then maybe you shouldn't have moved out of your Mommy and Daddy's house. Just let them take care of you forever.

There should not be a minimum wage in Thailand or any other country. Wages paid should be left up to market forces. As an employer you should be allowed to pay what you can afford for the quality of worker/worker you desire. If you do not pay well you will not get the best workers and your business will suffer. As a worker, if you do not like the pay you receive you can either work harder and hopefully receive better pay or you can find a new job that does pray more.

It is not the government's responsibility to ensure that you get the wage you want, it is your responsibility! Requiring a minimum wage never worked in any country and all you bleeding hearts that think it is the job of the government to "protect" the workers from the "greedy" business owners need to get a grasp on reality and understand what really happens when the government forces businesses to pay a minimum wage: prices go up, businesses fail and workers become unemployed.