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Issues Pages:
A Living Minimum
Tue, 2014-02-04 09:40
#1
A Living Minimum
Tue, 2014-02-04 09:56
#2
If you are serious about poverty reduction, replacing the minimum wage -- currently set everywhere across Canada at a level below what it needed to make ends meet -- with a living wage -- enough to bring all working Canadians above the poverty line -- makes utmost sense.
How long would it take for the economy and market adjustments to render any new living wage level below the poverty line once again? We can look at the increase in bread prices alone in recent years to get an indication. Unless the stock market is abolished or brought under strict control, anything obtained or granted in the struggle for a living wage is destined to be corrected in such a way as to produce the same hand to mouth existence in poverty, representative of a temporary reprieve at best. Poverty is bad enough without the indignity of having people engage in chase the tail activism.
Tue, 2014-02-04 17:53
#3
Catchfire
What about having it pegged to some other index subject to inflation or market forces? I'm no economist, but I imagine if it didn't keep a living wage more or less steady (likely), it would set up a kind of Strangelovian doomsday device where two values careening out of control would eventually turn the entire system to ashes.
Tue, 2014-02-04 18:27
#4
If you pegged the wage to inflation, and the index wasn't rigged somehow, it would by definition keep up.
Tue, 2014-02-04 18:29
#5
The system would eventually implode as well if the value of labour were cadenced to value of production. That is, if it wasn't pegged accordingly, the same problems would arise on a cyclical basis, along with a renewal of similar arguments for a living wage as are being put forward now, all negotiated under similar political constraints. It might work if profit were capped to a percentage of the value of the production, minus the cost of production. The tax portion could be set to take into account the remaining proceeds.
Wed, 2014-02-05 11:26
#6
If you pegged the wage to inflation, and the index wasn't rigged somehow, it would by definition keep up.
If there was deflation (as there is now) would the wage go down?
Thu, 2015-01-08 11:24
#7
A Few Dollars More - Labor Pursues the Impossible Dream of Being Middle Class
Advocates of neoliberalism, from the World Bank to the media, have spent three decades generating a discourse about the poverty-reducing benefits of global capitalism, lately identifying a rapidly expanding middle class — and the developmental hopes that may bring. The power of neoliberal institutions makes it unsurprising that their discourse shapes the way other organisations think. Even so, it’s disappointing that the International Labour Organisation (ILO), representing the interests of the working class, has taken up this discourse, which is an attempt to obscure the real class relations in contemporary capitalism and to divide the working class: it is a tacit admission that being working class in the developing world means being poor.