Minimum wage 'denies work'

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

THE MINIMUM wage will deny people the chance to work, the new CBI president said yesterday. The pounds 3.60-an-hour rate, to be implemented by the National Minimum Wage Act, was at the "top end" of the range the CBI saw as being "workable", said Sir Clive Thompson, chief executive of Rentokil Initial. "What I'm really against is the issue, simply because I think it denies people the opportunity of being employed," he told the BBC1 Breakfast With Frost.

A CBI surveys says that skills shortages have hit output in nearly half of British companies. While the CBI's employment trends survey shows a decisive shift in employee attitude toward flexibility and companies toward the need for training, both service and manufacturing sectors reported a debilitating lack of qualified staff.