Minimum Wages

[Tom]

Good luck getting 40h/week on minimum wage. Plenty of places will over hire so they don't have any "full time" staff and don't have to pay any benefits. So now add on less take home, more travel (multiple jobs?), and having to pay more for health care.

[Darren Dirt]

If minimum wage was intended to pay for a family of 2 adults and multiple kids it would be a very different economic (and political) world that exists.

That is what training and skills are for -- better compensation for more valuable work.

Unless the minimum wage goes up to $40/hour -- then everybody can be a single income family again ...yay... until every business has to reduce hours or raise prices or go under... boo...

Even the stats linked from the GoA policy promotion webpage reveals how small a % of minimum wage earners are single parents. Something like 20%. Most are either young adults, students... and almost always a secondary income in the household -- which is sadly needed as the state grows decade by decade providing more and more unsustainable expensive programs; that's the actual problem not so called "greed" of business owners like Trudope tries to claim as he punishes doctors and other professionals who are trying to build something of value.

[Thorin]

I thought my position was clear from the beginning of both of my posts.

Well, what I saw was a couple of posts with links and then quotes of comments by others from those links without any opinion from you.

Then yesterday unexpectedly found a HuffPo article dated that day about MW. It was related to Ontario but similar, only it was dealing with a reality and most of the comments were not in favor of what the Ontario government was doing... which surprised me because HuffPo is very left leaning so the lack of pro-MW-boost comments was noteable imo.

[..]

Would you like me to find the provincial governments' webpages that have plenty of links on the pro side? Those are easy to find, unlike a con side on a left leaning media site hence my share.

So you shared it not because of a particular opinion of yours but because you were surprised that a particular website presented a particular opinion?

So, you posted it to point out that someone had a different perspective than you expected?  Doesn't seem like it would further the discussion in any meaningful way...

Trudope

Name-calling will kill every civil discussion or debate.

[Thorin]

It might be worthwhile to see what actual experts on macro-economics think.  I'm a numbers guy, very analytical, and I like looking at this kind of stuff, but I'll be the first to admit I'm not an expert and there are probably many factors I'm missing.

The obvious factors that I do see:

In the 60s, minimum wage as a percentage of average income was higher than in the following decades, meaning that minimum wage earners had more purchasing power than they did in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.  In the 00s, minimum wage as a percentage of average income started going back up, meaning that minimum wage earners were finally recovering the level of purchasing power they'd last see in the late 60s.  Anecdotally, I see this in my kids being able to buy things with less hours worked than I did when I was a kid.

Minimum wage is required to counter the natural greediness of employers.  An employer naturally wants to pay as little as possible for anything, as that will then increase their profit potential, and profit is the reason companies exist.  Many of the complaints about minimum wage are from employers, of course they are, they think their profits will be affected.  The same outcry came out against the idea of freezing or cancelling the Temporary Foreign Workers program.  Never mind that companies were abusing the TFW program to get cheaper labour than they could get in the local labour market, thus increasing their profits at the cost of employment for local workers.  Anecdotally, the McDonalds owner here in town threatened that he would have to close his restaurants at slow hours if he was forced to hire local workers at local rates.  Everyone laughed at him, because it's pretty well known that he's making upwards of a million a year per McDonalds (there's four).

Inflation is a fact of life in our economy because that is the style of economy we have chosen to follow.  Every year, there is more money created than destroyed, thus each dollar becomes less valuable.  Canadian governments have acknowledged this, and income tax is generally indexed to inflation now.  What I mean by that is if you don't get a raise you will pay less tax next year than this year because the credits etc will be raised by the same amount as the inflation for the year.  And if you get a raise that is equal to the inflation for the year, then you will have the same purchasing power as you did the year before.  This is generally called a cost of living increase.

As for benefits with "full-time work" (aka forty hours per week), there is nothing enshrined in law that says an employer needs to give you anything more beyond minimum wage and four percent of your income as vacation pay (or two weeks off), extra pay if they make you work more than eight hours a day, and extra pay if they make you work on one of the nine statutory holidays (nine in Alberta, differs in other provinces).  Employers that over-hire typically do so in order to avoid paying any workers overtime even if a couple of workers get sick or quit.

Tom, you're right that there are employers that really don't respect their people.  These employers are trying to maximize their profits, not their workers' life enjoyment, and workers are right to unite and demand better wages and working conditions.  As a worker that bothers me, but if I were a business owner I'm sure I'd be on the other side of the coin.  It's a natural tension that we'll never get away from.

Companies large and small have seen many tax cuts over the last several decades because of constant calls of not being able to thrive due to too many and too high of costs (taxes, wages, materials, etc).  On the one hand, paying 78% of income in taxes truly is a burden.  On the other hand, small business are now at 0% to 3% in income taxes.  Maybe it's just owners being naturally greedy?

My opinion?  I'm glad that minimum wage earners are seeing their long-eroded purchasing power restored somewhat.  I know that the increase in minimum wage will be reflected in goods bought from companies that use minimum-wage employees, but I'm sure based on previous experiences that we'll barely notice the difference as it will be gradual and not as much as business owners are trying to convince us of.  Many of the smaller business owners, doctors, lawyers, fastfood franchisees, use every loophole possible to pay as little tax as possible.  When comparing them to workers with similar assets and life activities (kids in sports, vacations, etc), said business owners are paying less tax already.

Anecdotally, I've seen doctors with $2mil in billables, $1.2mil in expenses leaving $0.8mil in profits that then pay less tax than a worker making $80k (or $0.08mil, or one-tenth of what the doctor makes), because the doctor knows to put everything through the business as much as possible, in order to pay for their assets and life activities with pre-tax dollars.  Is that "greed"?  Yes.  Is it natural?  Yes, I'd do the same in the same situation.

And I need to address what you said in your last post, Darren, about "a secondary income in the household -- which is sadly needed as the state grows decade by decade providing more and more unsustainable expensive programs".  It's not the government that is causing my cost of living to increase, it's the greedy business owners that want more and more profit.  It is not the government that says cars will now cost more, a note from the doctor will now cost more, etc.  It is the business owners (both large like car companies and small like doctor's offices) that want to increase their profits and thus charge us more.

[Mr. Analog]

Well said Thorin, bravo!