Disability and the Minimum Wage

I am sure that Tory MP Phillip Davies didn't quite expect the firestorm he received when talking about the best way of getting disabled people back into work. However in amongst the fury I am not sure I have understood his proposal.

Is Shipley MP Davies suggesting that in a job interview between 2 equally qualified candidates where somebody is disabled and somebody not disabled, that the job will go the able bodied employee and so the only way to make disabled people more employable is to give them the chance to offer to work for less?

If so, could less qualified people offer to work for less too? What about carers? Or working mums? After all, they sometimes find it difficult to find employment. What about people in Wakefield and Watford negotiating different rates because of different costs of living?

If they did do this you may as well scrap the minimum wage altogether because you'd end up with people under-cutting each other on wages to get jobs and where the labour of one person in one area is worth less than the same job being done by a different person in a different area.

But I suppose we do this anyway - we hold the minimum wage down for young people to help make them more employable.

So shouldn't we have some consistency on this issue? If we want one, a "national" minimum wage should mean just that. If we want "flexibility" it ought to be for more people than just the young.

At the moment I fear we're muddled on the Minimum Wage.
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