By bizn_fun 
Luke Johnson, the former chairman of Pizza Express and a director of Gail’s bakery and Brompton Bicycles, said: “The government is making it more expensive and more risky to employ people and so I think entrepreneurs and managers will not create the jobs.”
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The mood amongst employers and those who invest in this country is the darkest I have ever seen.”
He argued that it was fair to pay a lower rate to young workers because “if someone is less experienced and less well trained than someone who has been doing the job for a while they are not necessarily going to be as productive”.
Johnson said the timing of the planned increases in the minimum wage was a “tragedy” for young people because there was set to be a “substantial rise in unemployment” in the coming years due to Artificial Intelligence and other factors.
But Andy Prendergast, national secretary of the GMB Union, which represents workers across public utilities, engineering and food and drink manufacturing, said it was “nonsense” to suggest equalising minimum wage rates would destroy jobs.
He said youth unemployment was a “big problem that needs to be dealt with” but it had been increasing for “a very long time” and equalised rates had not even come in yet.
“Employers tell us that every single improvement in workers’ rights is going to cause a problem and time and time again they have been proved wrong,” he told Today.