Minimum Wage Campaign: on the Rise
2007Barry Weisleder 2007-03The page as the paper published it (Wayback Machine) →
From the paper's own web edition, recovered from the Internet Archive: the text as the paper put it online, not machine-read. The printed issue of March 2007 is not held.
by Barry Weisleder / March 2007
The campaign to raise the minimum wage, long advocated by socialists and anti-poverty groups, and now spear-headed by the New Democratic Party and local labour councils, is registering important gains.
It has captured the hearts and minds of working people who realize that our real wages declined for twenty years while corporate profits surged ahead.
On the strength of the demand to raise the minimum hourly rate to $10, the NDP won a provincial by-election in the Ontario riding of York South-Weston (in Toronto) on February 8, with 43.3 per cent of the votes, erasing the previous Liberal majority of 61 per cent in 2003.
The issue has put the business parties on the defensive, propelled the left-liberal Toronto Star newspaper into crusade mode, and grabbed the centre of attention in Parliament, despite the limited federal jurisdiction and the resistence of Tory and Liberal politicians there who voted down an NDP resolution. The demand is the theme for International Women’s Day in Toronto on March 8, and is the subject of a big effort involving leaflets, stickers and organizing by Toronto and York Region Labour Council. Clearly, this campaign has legs.
Currently, the minimum hourly wage is set by the provinces and territories. It ranges from $7 in Alberta, New Brunswick and Newfoundland, to $8.25 in Nunavut in the far north. The Ontario Liberal government just raised it a whole 25 cent coin to $8, after giving MPPs a whopping 25 per cent salary boost.
By comparison to seven or eight dollars, $10 an hour might look good. But keep in mind that if one is lucky enough to have 40 hours a week of paid employment, it produces a measly $20,800 annual income, before taxes. According to the Canadian Council on Social Development, in 2005, a family of two (e.g. one parent and one child) living in a city of over 500,000 population, earning less than $25,867 a year is living below the poverty line.
For that reason the NDP Socialist Caucus urges the party leadership to fight for a raise in the minimum wage to at least $12.50 an hour. That would generate an annual income of $26,000 - barely enough to keep head above water -- assuming the rate is attached to a secure, full-time job, which is so often not the case, especially for women, visible minorities and recent immigrants.