I agree with reward. I want everyone earning a decent wage. But like I said we need to keep inflation down. Otherwise the pay rise would be lost to inflation.
Chances are pay rises would be lost to inflation anyway - you increase income for anyone and someone will try and up the price of whatever they're selling to take it from you.It's my biggest issue with ideas like basic income.
You get the never-ending cycle of
"we've had to put prices up because wage costs have gone up"
"wages need to go up because prices have gone up"
To break that cycle (or at least minimise it's effect) one needs to be below the other.
9 times out of 10 that will be achieved though wage increases being below that of price increases (except quite often for those at the top who given themselves above inflation rises and thus distort the true figure for wage inflation and make the situation worse for those at the bottom).
What I'm saying is if in this instant you want to keep inflation down but enable people to have a wage they can afford to live from this time the burden would need to fall on the prices and businesses would have to reduce their profit margin. Had they accepted the burden on a more equal footing in the past the issue of having an affordable living wage would not be such an issue now.
Of course some will argue about smaller businesses being impacted to a greater extent as they can't take advantage of economies of scale etc and this on the whole is true. But according to capitalist thinking if they can't sustain their business like that then it should naturally die off. Also looking at it in a cold, macroeconomic environment being small businesses their number of employees will be smaller so their impact on the unemployment rate and economy will be less, but it would also provide opportunities for others who can either provide the same or similar product/service more cost-effectively or replace it with something newer or better.
For example when in accounting it was standard practice to take the previous years fee and increase by 5% - this happened at three different practices I worked for and seems likely was similar elsewhere looking at new clients previous accounts and talking to others. Wage costs made up a significant amount of the overall costs in producing the accounts, but never once did our wages increase by anywhere near that much at each pay grade. In fact in subsequent years it was often quicker (and therefore cheaper) to do the accounts because you'd got used to a clients idiosyncrasies in bookkeeping etc. yet the business always put the prices up even though it very rarely was costing them the equivalent. This increase was only ever forgone if the client looked like they may be changing accountants, which on average would probably be between three to five years, though some could be a decade or more. It was increased profit margin more than increased cost.