Several government policies can directly compress wage dispersion from below. Statutory minimum wages can play an important role. In most countries statutory minimum wages are between 40 and 60 per cent of median (or if not available average) wages. Minimum wages below 40 per cent of median wages must be considered unexceptionally low.

The issues is not so much should you have a minimum wage or not. We don’t hear that debate at all very much in the ILO anymore, but [it’s] really about how the minimum wage should be operated.

[I]nternational experience… demonstrates that a national minimum wage can work. It can protect low-paid workers without adverse employment effects and I think it’s an experience worth considering for South Africa as well.

Sound wage-setting institutions should also address rising inequalities, including those between men and women, by promoting the right to equal remuneration for work of equal value.

Evidence from a large sample of countries suggests that de facto labor market regulations (such as minimum wages, unionization, and social security contributions), on average, tend to improve the income distribution.

[T]he polarization of income distribution and the decline in the wage share [plays] an important role in the generation of unbalanced and unequal growth.

Minimum wages are used by governments and social partners to provide protection for wage earners against unduly low wages and as one element in a policy designed to overcome poverty.

[R]ather than disturbing the market system and threatening to prevent it from functioning optimally, rigid nominal wages resulting from trade union wages policy or statutory minimum wages are in actual fact considered to be a requirement for the functioning of capitalist monetary economies.