Raising minimum wage is only the first step

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Next February, the McGuinty provincial Liberals will make good on their promise to raise Ontario's minimum wage to $8 per hour. Since their term in office, the McGuinty government has followed through in their committment to help the province's lowest income-earners (and most vulnerable). Considering the former Tory government, led by Mike Harris, had frozen minimum wage at a meagre sum of $6.85 per hour, this increase is welcome news to the working poor and to poverty groups across the province.

However, a Toronto Star editorial this past weekend aptly points out that if the government were to take into consideration rate of inflation, cost of living and the income earning potential of the working poor, minimum wage in Ontario should be set at a $15 per hour.

Unfortunately, this is where the business communities doom and gloom forecasts come in. Everytime a wage increase (or an energy cost increase, or a supplier cost increase, etc., etc.) occurs, corporations threaten to take their production, their wages and their business elsewhere. While any production increase (including wages) does result in a shift within the economic fabric of a region, it does not preclude a barren landscape, filled with roaming poor and long, weaving lines of shiftless, jobless oafs. In the 20th and 21st centuries, there are many countries within the Western democratic (read: neo-liberal) sphere demanding better wages and better terms for even non-union employees and these countries (and their citizens) continue to exist economically in unison with large business profits.

However, the reality is in North America there is always a loop hole. These days (as for the last decade or so) the greatest (and easiest) loop hole is the role of the contract worker. Rather than pay such a high minimum wage, many employers opt to contract out the work, in effect replacing full- or part-time employees with self-employed contractors, who are not covered by minimum wage laws.

And it is not just private corporations that are employing this tactic. More and more our own three-tier governmental system is relying upon the trend of contracting out work. It's a trend that worries anti-poverty activists. As such, they are calling for a new government-funded earned-income supplement. Their argument is that the supplement would increase the incomes of all working poor, not just those earning the minimum wage.

At present, the income supplement is a stop-gap method used by the federal government to help low-income seniors to make ends meet. However, anti-poverty activists are calling for the supplement to be implemented for all working poor under a pre-defined level of earning.

As the Daily Food Bank stated in a 2003 report: Our economy is highly dependent on low-wage and minimum wage jobs. Without office cleaners, food court workers, parking attendants, and hotel workers, for example, many of our key industries would be unable to function. And yet there is increasing evidence that these workers are unable to afford to live and work in our city. Ontario’s minimum wage has been frozen at $6.85 per hour since 1995. Since 1998, the average price of a two bedroom apartment in Toronto has increased by 18.9% to $1,047 per month. A minimum wage earner would have to work 118 hours per week to be able to afford an average apartment in Toronto.

While corporations are an essential component of the economic fabric of this nation, so are the low-income, unskilled labourers that fuel our behind-the-scenes lifestyles. As such, we need to examine how we treat these labourers and that examination cannot place the welfare of a corporation above the welfare of the most vulnerable within society.

It is commendable that the McGuinty government is following through on their committment to the working poor by raising the minimum wage -- the next step, however, is to ensure a base earning rate for all of Canada's low-income earners; a base rate that would provide all of Canada's workers with a standard of living befitting a first-world nation.

For more information on the Daily Food Bank findings go to: http://www.northyorkharvestfoodbank.com/Resource%20Centre/Research/can_people_afford_to_work_in_toronto.htm

For my blog on minimum wage go to: http://rkresponsibleliving.blogspot.com/2006/08/make-mine-minimum-wage.html

To read the Toronto Star editorial on minimum wage go to: http://www.thestar.com