Here at home, similar research at the London School of Economics demonstrated that the wages councils (and the sectoral minimum wages they set) did not hold back employment in the Eighties, nor did their abolition create more jobs.Dean Smith’s experience provides some clue to why a minimum wage need not cost jobs. Security companies are facing rising demand for their services, with no competition from low-wage labour in developing countries. Wages are low because they compete with each other to keep profits up and costs down. Turnover is high as employees seek better jobs, and firms always need new staff. A national minimum wage might reduce security companies’ profits.

It might also make it easier for them to find motivated employees who stick with the job. But it does not follow that the minimum wage would make them cut their staff.Moreover, a minimum wage is crucial to the success of any strategy to get people off welfare and into work. Most jobs available to the unemployed are low paid, and leave people no better off than they were on the dole. Expanding work subsidies is the best way to provide the incentive to take jobs But without a minimum wage, they are useless. Higher family credit payments gives employers an incentive to cut wages further. Although the Confederation of British Industry now denies that this happens, Dean Smith knows his employer already does it.A minimum wage alone is not a solution to poverty or unemployment. In the long term, Dean needs qualifications and skills if he is to get out of poverty pay.

But without a minimum wage, government has little hope of targeting resources to help people like him, and getting the unemployed into work.How long does it take to earn …Big Mac with Television Ford Fiestasmall fries: pounds 2.88 pounds 400 pounds 9,800Hairdresser 1hour 20 mins 185hrs 28 monthspounds 2.40 an hourSecurity guard 1hr 5 mins 148 hrs 22 monthspounds 3.20 an hourNurse 25 mins 61 hrs 9 monthspounds 8.80 an hourUnion official 20 mins 48 hrs 31 weekspounds 11.50 an hourSolicitor 15mins 33hrs 20 weekspounds 17.50 an hourChief executive 1 min 50 secs 4hrs 20mins 13 dayspounds 150 an hourCalculations tax adjusted. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the international body running this Saturday’s elections in Bosnia, has an underground newspaper circulating at its headquarters in Sarajevo which nicely sums up its staff’s blackly comic desperation about the chances of a free and fair poll The paper is called Mission Impossible. There have been many misgivings about the wisdom of holding a multi- layered election of exceptional complexity with almost none of the usual preconditions for democratic voting, and it seems 14 September will not be the culmination of the problems so much as a stepping-stone to more.
Serbs, Muslims and Croats will elect a joint presidency and parliament as well as a slew of separate bodies that are almost certain to fill up with members of the same nationalist parties that triggered the war and split the country into ethnically distinct units. That on its own may be enough for many international observers to decry the proceedings as a farce, but the hardest battle – over the make-up of Bosnia’s municipalities – has been postponed indefinitely because of fears of the potentially uncontrollable tensions that local elections could cause.The talk in Bosnia these days is less of 14 September than of the new date for the municipal poll. The United States is pushing hard for November, or December at the latest, so that Bill Clinton can face his own electorate with the – rather hollow – claim that the peace process is running on track and that the US troops will be home within a year as promised.Such a date would leave little or no time to address the underlying problems that caused the municipal elections to be postponed, and would create an organisational nightmare because of the hard Bosnian winter. Many polling stations would be inaccessible because of snow, and it might take weeks to collate the results.The international community may have to delay the municipal poll until next spring or summer (possibly putting off an announcement until the US elections are over).