02) MELT THE FREEZE! CAMPAIGN TO RAISE ONTARIO'S MINIMUM WAGE

By Jean Kenyon

     Fourteen communities across Ontario took part in a campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage, launched on March 21. The campaign was co‑ordinated by the Workers' Action Centre and supported by eight other grassroots groups including the Toronto and York Region Labour Council.

     Participants rallied at the Ministry of Labour in Toronto, and at MPPs' offices from Sault Ste Marie to Belleville to Windsor. They brought blocks of ice with a $10 bill and a quarter inside, to illustrate their demand to Melt the Freeze! The minimum wage in Ontario has been frozen at $10.25/hr since April 2010, while the cost of living in this expensive province keeps pulling out of reach.

     One in ten workers in Ontario ‑ 534,000 of us ‑ now work for the minimum wage. This is double the number it was ten years ago. If you include workers who earn scarcely above the minimum, the proportion rises to one in six, or about 800,000 workers. Many are trying to scrape together a living with two or three part‑time low‑wage jobs.

     And it isn't only youth who are struggling with abysmally low wages, Armine Yalnizian of Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives points out. The proportion of older workers among minimum wage earners is steadily increasing.

     A wage of $10.25 at 35 hours per week comes to approximately $1700/month, or $18,000/year. And many low‑wage workers do not even get this many hours.

     Who can live on $1700/month in Ontario today? You are continually choosing between housing, proper food, heat and hydro, a means of transportation, internet and phone bills, clothing and shoes ‑ and that's if you don't have a child to provide for too. Or student debt to pay down. And saving for retirement? A joke.

     Trish Hennessy heads up the new Ontario office of Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. She points out that Ontario's minimum wage cannot be considered a living wage. "In Ontario, one in three children who live in low‑income families have at least one parent who is working ‑ meaning work doesn't pay enough to lift them out of poverty. That's the problem with using the minimum wage as the only standard. It limits the conversation to what's the lowest amount we can pay workers that's politically acceptable."

     The Workers' Action Centre states, "The minimum wage should be enough to keep workers out of poverty. It should be benchmarked at 10% above the poverty line." Therefore WAC is calling for a raise to $14/hour.

     For a single person in Ontario today, the poverty line, or "Low Income Measure", is $23,000/year. (That is, half of our society's median income.) This is the income one needs in order not to experience social exclusion because of a lack of things that others take for granted.

     To have breathing room of 10% above the poverty line, a single Ontarian would need to earn $24,500/year. This works out to $14/hr. No full‑time worker in Ontario should earn any less than this, before deductions.

     In a report by Bob White on Corporate Social Responsibility and a Living Wage, he writes, "The living wage is defined as the minimum hourly wage necessary for each of two workers in a family of four to meet basic needs and to participate in the civic/social life of their community." He places a living wage in Canada today at over $16/hr.

     But the trend is now clearly in the opposite direction. Stephen Harper may claim that most new jobs are being created "in industries that pay high wages". But as Armine points out in her article Welcome to the Wageless Recovery! ‑ Harper is pulling a bit of a deception. The construction industry, for example, pays high wages to some highly skilled workers. But that doesn't mean that most of the new jobs created in that industry pay high wages! In fact entry‑level positions are falling further and further behind the average wage in many industries, and wage scales are starting to be ratcheted down. The bottom 40% of the work force has seen a significant erosion of wages, and a loss of hope for the future.

     The trend toward lower wages is made worse by Ontario's starvation‑level social assistance rates. One group supporting the Workers' Action Centre's campaign is called Put Food in the Budget. This group challenges "middle class" Ontarians to try eating on a welfare budget for a week. Spokesperson Lily Baumgartner said, "I'm tired of seeing the government and the media play the poor against each other. Low social assistance rates and low minimum wages are part of one strategy: to keep people in perpetual poverty, to keep them down, so they can easily be exploited by those with power."

     But wouldn't raising the minimum wage cause unemployment? Wouldn't employers stop hiring? Experience does not bear this out, according to Armine Yalnizian. The years when the minimum wage was being steadily raised were also years of strong hiring. And even during the recession, many provinces and territories raised their minimum wages without suffering job loss.

     Better wages at the bottom actually support job growth, she adds, because the lowest‑income people spend all they have back into the economy. Consumer spending drives more than half of our gross domestic product. So bringing the lowest‑paid people up makes the most sense for economic prosperity.

     Just to reach the equivalent value of the minimum wage we had back in the 1970s, we would have to raise it to $11.50/hr immediately. This is recommended by Ontario's biggest anti‑poverty group, 25 in 5. It would give the lowest paid workers an increase of $2500 a year.

     And if the Ontario government's annual 75‑cent increases had continued beyond 2010, we would be reaching $12.50/hr now, in the spring of 2013. That would have been good, but it would still be short of the poverty line for a single person, and far below it for a worker with any dependants.

     We need to get the minimum wage up to at least $14/hr as fast as possible ‑ then see that it is indexed to inflation thereafter.

     The Workers' Action Centre concludes: Ontarians can't wait for another commission to study when the minimum wage should be raised and by how much. We need action now!

     The campaign continues.

(The above article is from the May 1-15, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)