This would be achieved by moral persuasion and possibly implicit and explicit government pressure. We are told that ‘the moral pressures are winning out over the economic pressures’. Yet what moral virtue is there in a policy that causes the loss of jobs for low-wage, low-skill workers or which causes the lengthening of unemployment terms? Countries with high minimum wages and/or high social costs - such as France - have high long-term unemployment (nearly half the unemployed have been jobless for longer than a year in France). As unemployment terms lengthen, productivity declines and it becomes ever more difficult for people to find work once priced out by a high minimum wage.