WITH the minimum wage set to increase in 2027, small and medium businesses in Limerick are struggling to meet the increasing costs.
A local café in the city, who has chosen to stay anonymous, shared how it’s affecting them. They explained that the effect of the wage increase is considered on a yearly basis rather than a monthly one.
”Business needs to be profitable year over year, not month over month. Every increase of minimal wages cost us thousands, yearly,” the owner said. ”Looking at simple math, if I give for example 20 hours to 5 employees weekly, that becomes 100h [hours] total weekly to pay. Yearly, it comes to 5,200 hours to pay out.”
This increase has the payout rising from €73,580 to €77,688. While this may look small, the business must also pay their employees for their PRSI, holiday payment and the new My Future Fund NAERSA Auto Enrollment.
To try to balance the additional costs, the café has had to make some adjustments. This includes increasing the price of their services and products and reducing employee hours.
The local limerick business remains afloat but is skeptical on how much more increases they can take.
“We’ve survived them all, so I’m staying hopeful to survive this one too, although, I have my doubts how many of these [increases] we can take in the future,” they stated. “There’s only as much band aids we can use to cover the little cuts, before we start bleeding out to death.”
The café still wishes to “provide a product/service with a quality good enough, to keep your customers happy and coming back to you,” while also seeing the benefit in the minimum wage increase for their employees.
“Hourly wage increase is definitely going to help the folks out, if I was one of them, I’d be very happy to receive them,” the owner clarified, bearing no ill will towards the increase.
However, the worry for the Limerick local business still remains.
“It’s necessary to keep the pay equality, protect the lowest paid people and secure the real buying power. But who’s there to protect and secure us?”