$16 living wage?

Absolutely right.

Pinocchio and his friends on Bay Street might agree to $16 per hour 10 or 20 years from now. I think in the mean time, minimum wage needs boosting somewhere $10 dollars an hour or above as of yesterday, and all incomes below poverty boosted in additional ways through child tax credits or income supplements for seniors etc. And all those mechanisms have to be indexed to inflation, or there is no point in feigning concern for the poor and their children.

I think it was Whigs n' Tories who managed to stall enactment of Irish corn laws while a few million more people died of the economic long run there, too.

Viva La Revolución

Ya we know, there's no child poverty or homelessness in Bates McGuilty's Toronto either.  Pinocchio's Bay Streeters voted themselves 25% more as of last year and 0% for the poor today, tomorrow, and the year after that. There's only one thing worse than a talking 22% wooden Bay Street puppet, and that's a sock puppet to a wooden Bay St. puppet.

Viva La Revolución

jrose, thanks for this article. I like the idea of looking at "a living wage", which helps to fully round out that people in poverty are you know, actual human beings. I'm guessing the CCPA took the lowest possible figure, to put the idea in people's heads and to make it palatable to those who would object to the "lavish" lifestyle of going to the movies with one's child once in a while.  

(hey, no more rolleye smilie. Cueball got his wish!)

 

 

<>What mechanism would keep cost of living the same in a jurisdiction
where the minimum wage is raised by over 50%? What effect would that
have on the wages of workers who have spent 10 - 15 years in the
workforce to get to a similar or only slightly higher level of wage?
What does Living Wage say about how that jurisdiction will handle the
inevitable in-migration of workers from nearby jurisdictions, thereby
creating increased demand on housing and services? Isn't housing in
Alberta already an excample of what upward pressure on wages does to a
jurisdiction? 

Ghislaine wrote:

Fidel wrote:

Pinocchio and his friends on Bay Street might agree to $16 per hour 10 or 20 years from now. I think in the mean time, minimum wage needs boosting somewhere $10 dollars an hour or above as of yesterday, and all incomes below poverty boosted in additional ways through child tax credits or income supplements for seniors etc. And all those mechanisms have to be indexed to inflation, or there is no point in feigning concern for the poor and their children.

Yes, Viva la Revolucion...when do you think Cubans will make anywhere near a living wage, as defined by the study?

Counter-question: When, do you imagine, that half of Canadian women will have incomes of more than $20,000 a year? $20,000 is a king's ransom in Cuba, but here in Canada it's not enough to live well on. $20,000 is subsistence income in Canada, one of the largest countries in the world with unparalleled natural resource wealth siphoned off to the imperial master nation 24-7.

When will 80% of women in Canada break the $40,000 dollar a year barrier?

When will nearly 10.5 million men and women in Canada earn more than $20,000 dollars a year?

Brian Baloney (and Chretien and Manley, too) promised Canadians unspeakable prosperity and "jobs! jobs! jobs!" if Canadians were to trust them with phony-baloney majority governments in 1988 and 1993, 1997 and so on. The original Pinocchio didnt tell these colossal lies.

Sven wrote:

Ghislaine wrote:

Yes, Viva la Revolucion...when do you think Cubans will make anywhere near a living wage, as defined by the study?

About ten years post-collapse of the Communist regime in Cuba.  Until then?  Grinding poverty for all (except for the party big wigs, of course)...

36 million food insecure in the USA

Capitalism is a monumental failure

My observation of Cuba was that no one was food insecure.

The fat cats in Cuba are not the Party brass, it's the tour operators.  I rented a room from the director of pediatrics of the regional hospital in Santiago who made more from that than his day job.

 I would expect that if Sven had his way with Cuba it would quickly look more like Haiti than it looked like Canada.  Not that Sven would want that, but that would be the consequences of what he would do.  Similarly to the consequences of not regulating mortgages in the US.

 

 

Sven wrote:

Fidel wrote:

36 million food insecure in the USA

Capitalism is a monumental failure

 

Let’s take your number as correct for purposes of this discussion. That means that about 90% of the USA population is NOT “food insecure”.

That's more than three times the population of Cuba who are food insecure in the USA.

U.S. Opposes Right to Food at World Summit 

Capitalism is a monstrous ideology

 

It wasnt Fidel who ducked flying shoes in Baghdad recently. Apparently the torture wasnt as bad under Saddam.

Quote:

"Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to."
William Blum

American woman gonna mess your mind Kiss my ass, Uncle Sam

Sven, is it your belief that the government of Cuba is responsible for more poverty than the Embargo?

Is it fair to compare the economic conditions of Cuba to that of Canada? The land and resources per capita is much less in Cuba than in Canada. Canadian settler society has artificially inflated its wealth with stolen resources and land. Wouldn't a more acurate comparison be of one of the many Indigenous communities that Canada has blockaded into a reserve while putting up trade embargos on any form of economic activity that offends capital?

I think that blaming Castro(s) for the economic conditions in Cuba is a bit like blaming Phil Fontaine for economic conditions on some reserves. Just like Castro, Fontaine is better off than most of the people he claims to represent and the policies of both men might not be what would come from the grassroots. Just like Castro people question Fontaine's democratic legitamacy. But it would look foolish for someone to blame Fontaine and the 'AFN regime' for poverty in Indigenous communities, no?

Refuge wrote:

That being said I have a quesiotn -who would make up the difference in wage?  I ask this because a friend of mine owns a small store and if he had to pay the employees $16 he would go out of business.

If his business is that marginal he should have fewer employees, pay those few he has to have better, and work more himself.

___________________________________________________________
"watching the tide roll away"

Why not just make it $100/hour and be done with it? 

 

 

________________________________________________

Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!!

Sven wrote:

Why not just make it $100/hour and be done with it? 

Questions like this miss the point: how does one construct a business where you pay full-time employees a living wage? That should be your starting point; not glib dismissals and apologies for the capitalist status quo. How can you dismiss human dignity?

With that in mind, I have a question, but it's from a position of limited economic knowledge.  Presumably, the living wage would be for full-time, self-supporting employees. It doesn't make much sense to pay, say, high-school kids working pat time the same wage, does it? Or university students either. What would be the policy for paying both kinds of workers and how do you evaluate those kind of wages?

No kidding.  Equal pay for equal work.  It's none of anyone's business why a teenager is working.  If they're doing the same work as a 30 year-old, they should be paid the same as that 30 year-old.

They used to use that same reasoning for paying married women less than men doing the same work - well, they don't HAVE to work.  Their husbands are the real breadwinners.  The men need more money than the women because they have families to support.

Ghislaine wrote:

That would cause great unemployment. It would also cause a far greater workload for the remaining employees.

If he has that many employees that it would cause "great" unemployment, then he is not such a "small" business. All in all, it sounds like a excuse to have higher profit margins, by exploiting the workers working for an unlivable wage.

My parents were business owners, and they had seasonal employees, the minimum wage at that time in SK was 1.77 per hour. All their seasonal employees got 8/hr, plus tips, and this was at a time when 8/hr was unheard of in Canada for service industry people. However, they recognized these employees needed to have a livable wage, to carry them through until the next season, and that was more important to my parents, than my parents having higher profit margins and a huge savings account, when modest profits were still acheived.  It is social justice in action.

___________________________________________________________
"watching the tide roll away"

Ghislaine wrote:

yes, but how would they have reacted if the government came in and told them that theyhad decided a liveable wage was 10$ an hour and that they had no choice but to pay this?

I did not mean that that that one small business would cause great unemployement, but that if all small businesses were forced into this, it would cause greater unemployment in Canada as a whole.

 
If the government had decided that was the livable wage amount, I would bet my parents would have already been paying that, and would have lobbied the government to have said livable wage made. Again social justice in action by ethical business owners.

And I call BS on that statement of unemployment, because people would not have to be working 2-3 jobs in order to survive, so the extra jobs would be freed up for others seeking employment, and please do see the statement above about that excuse being used for women entering the work force. Profit margins are made from the backs of the employees, not the business owners, and thus excessive profits belong to the employees, not the owners.

___________________________________________________________
"watching the tide roll away"

Ghislaine wrote:

At age 16 and 17, while in high school, I also was a supervisor at a Subway restaurant. Had the much older staff I was supervising been making more than me per hour for less responsibility, I would not have been very happy.

I'll bet you couldnt have been very happy knowing that most 16 and 17 year-olds don't have the same cost of living that "much older" Canadians do. Or as a 16 and 17 year-old at the time, perhaps you werent aware of such things. 

 

Catchfire: "Presumably, the living wage would be for full-time, self-supporting employees. It doesn't make much sense to pay, say, high-school kids working pat time the same wage, does it? Or university students either. What would be the policy for paying both kinds of workers and how do you evaluate those kind of wages?"

In fact, the mininum wage for "Students under 18 and working not more than 28 hours per week during the school year or working during a school holiday" is currently $8.20 per hour rather than $8.75. This kind of differential minimum wage strikes me as inappropriate for a couple of reasons.

(1) I think that Michelle is right that it's none of anyone's business why a teenager is working. Some teenagers support themselves. Some adults don't. Many many university students support themselves (in response to Catchfire's suggested lower minimum wage to university students).

(2) The main argument for a lower minimum wage for students or teenagers or whatever is presumably that they don't need the money as much. But there are all sorts of people who have quite different financial needs: on the high end, for example, people with large families, people who are taking care of their elderly parents, people taking care of siblings, people taking care of friends; on the low end, single people with no dependents and no disabilities; people who have inherited assets; people who have wealthy and generous relatives. I do not think that it would be workable to have different minimum wages for each of these categories. This would force employers to engage in needs-testing, and would give them an incentive to hire employees, e.g., without children. Rather than differential minimum wages, we should have social programmes in place that make having children, or elderly parents who need care, etc., less onerous.

Well, in terms of your calculations:

1) Generally, when making the calculations for a living wage, debt payments aren't factored in, since each individual has different debt structure. 

2) If you had a child, you would be paying less taxes and would also get a small monthly payment, however this doesn't do much to offset daycare and other costs of having a child.

However, if those are student loans. it brings up another huge problem in Canadian society. In order to get a job that pays decently above minimum wage, so that we can participate fully in society, we need to go to post-secondary. To do this, we need to pay large sums of money which often leaves us with a great debt.

The oddest thing is that while some of the cost of going to school is tax deductible, it's only deductable in the year that we go to school, which in most cases, is a year we aren't earning very much.

I think a first step would be to make student loan payments tax deductible. But, given the reality, North Americans need to get used to the idea of not leaving home as soon as they turn 18. Many other cultures around the world stay at home with their parents until they are either married, or they buy their own home. 

 

Michelle wrote:

No kidding.  Equal pay for equal work. 

Well, I don't think it's 'no kidding', I'm just trying to channel the spirit of a 'living wage'--which is not a dollar figure, but is based on how workers can enjoy life--thus, if you have support, 16$ is not a 'living wage', is it? I might also suggest, tentatively, that 'equal pay for equal work' is a capitalist concept; although I certainly appreciate how it has helped minority wage rights in the past. But shouldn't we be concerned about what people can make of a wage rather than what labour is 'worth'?

However, I will easily concede the point that it's likely not the employer's business what  a worker does with her money. I'm only playing with the concept.

 

torontoprofessor wrote:

The main argument for a lower minimum wage for students or teenagers or
whatever is presumably that they don't need the money as much. But
there are all sorts of people who have quite different financial needs:
on the high end, for example, people with large families, people who
are taking care of their elderly parents, people taking care of
siblings, people taking care of friends; on the low end, single people
with no dependents and no disabilities; people who have inherited
assets; people who have wealthy and generous relatives. I do not think
that it would be workable to have different minimum wages for each of
these categories. This would force employers to engage in
needs-testing, and would give them an incentive to hire employees,
e.g., without children. Rather than differential minimum wages, we
should have social programmes in place that make having children, or
elderly parents who need care, etc., less onerous.

This makes much more sense to me as to why my 'theory' doesn't work. Ideally, social programmes would solve this problem of different needs, and employers couldn't possibly do this discrimination for the state. But then, toward this point, if such programmes were in place, a 'living wage' probably wouldn't exist as the same concept, right?

If an individual wants to shovel the neighborhood driveways and sidewalks as a full-time job, would the neighbors be required to pay that individual at least $16 per hour?  Which would mean the 85 year old living down the street who couldn't afford that would have to (1) shovel the walks herself, (2) let the walks go unshoveled, or (3) find someone who would do it for her for free.

____________________________________________________

Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!!

[quote=remind]...excessive profits...

 

Would anyone care to quantitatively define "excessive profits" versus "reasonable profits"? 

_____________________________________

Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!!