A leading union official has called on the Treasury to stop preventing younger workers from benefiting from the minimum wage.

In an exclusive interview with ePolitix.com Bill Connor, general secretary of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) predicts that young people will lose out when the minimum wage is increased to £4.10 and the youth wage remains at £3.50. He warns that "a number of employers will be unable to resist the temptation to exploit this anomaly."

Commenting on the way young workers are treated, Connor said they felt "undervalued, under appreciated and to some extent are used as a large pool of cheap labour."

On the lower minimum wage rate for those aged between 18 and 21 Connor said many major companies were paying the rate for the job irrespective of age.

He added: "Sadly we suspect the dead hand of the Treasury has been operating in the background and ministers are taking a kind of theoretical economic view on pay for young workers which is simply not justified by the evidence."

When asked whether he feels the government has been pressured into this minimum wage disparity by businesses, Connor replied: "No I think it's purely an economic view from the Treasury. I think all of the people we deal with, the major players like Tescos, Sainsbury's, Safeways, they all pay full rate at 18."

A Sainsbury's spokesman told ePolitix that the paying the full minimum wage helped the company attract people from all sectors. He added that Sainsbury's "didn't feel it would be right to discriminate on grounds of age".

Repeating his criticism of the role of the Treasury in preventing minimum wage rises for younger workers, the USDAW leader added that "the Treasury is worried about the effect on the New Deal. Which is nonsense and based, in our opinion, on unjustified prejudice."

He continued: "It's going to become more pronounced when we increase the minimum wage to £4.10 and the youth wage is £3.50. We think a number of employers will be unable to resist the temptation to exploit this anomaly." When asked how many people will be affected by this, Connor replied: "We don't know for sure but I'd imagine hundreds of thousands of young people will lose out as a result of this."

On the government's plans to introduce a £100 charge for taking a company to employment tribunals, Connor says: "We think that's absolutely disgraceful. The whole basis of tribunals since their introduction is to provide free access to justice. Unions in the main take those cases up, a high proportion of the cases get settled. Probably one per cent of cases get to tribunal".

"It seems to me to be a denial of justice to actually place that kind of a pressure on the worker because employers and unions are pretty good at determining what they should take forward. If we think a case can't be defended and can't stand up on its own merits we won't proceed to a tribunal. And probably around half the cases get turned down because that criteria is applied," he said.