IT is difficult not to sound rhetorical when discussing a decent minimum wage for our people, including the young. But listening to the ''haves'' of the CBI telling the rest of us that increasing wages will enhance job insecurity is particularly frustrating. Try advancing that argument in the boardroom of the 90s.

These same scare tactics were used by the employers during the campaign for a shorter working week in the late 1980s, and have since been proved, using the Government's own statistics, to be totally unfounded, and indeed quite the reverse has happened. Employees have become more productive working fewer hours, as would be the case if all employees were paid a decent minimum wage of #4 per hour.

The ancillary staff at my own place of work, who are employed by a sub-contract company, are not dancing in the aisles at the prospect of a proposed #3.60 per hour minimum wage and for many of them it will still mean having to be subsidised by the State in terms of welfare benefits.

The Labour Party promised to start the process of eradicating poverty. Where best to start than paying people a decent living wage, exposing unscrupulous employers, and improving people's quality of life? #4 per hour is not too high a threshold to begin with.

Jim Sheridan,

TGWU Convener,

Barr & Stroud, Glasgow.

May 28.