The Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound NDP has reviewed a letter authored by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and sent to Premier Kathleen Wynne. In it the Chamber opposes (without seeing) anticipated recommendations of the Province's Work Place Review. That Review may recommend more protection for precarious workers, making it easier for workers to organize, and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The NDP has been advocating these kinds of reforms for years and they are embedded in our 2014 Provincial policy book. We would prefer to see a living wage rather than a hike in the minimum wage since even $15/hr will not bring workers out of poverty. In 2015 the living wage for Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound would have injected some $40 million into the local economy.
The Chamber of Commerce letter tries to construct an alternative reality with alternative facts.
The Chamber's letter says the reforms will "have the perverse effect of discouraging investment and eliminating jobs." In fact, there is no evidence this will happen either from Alberta (where a $15/hr minimum is being phased in) or from seven decades of research in the US.
The Chamber's letter states 98% of jobs created since the Recession have been full time. That flies in the face of data from Stats Can (including the jobs report for April 2017) that show part time jobs are replacing full time jobs. In fact, low wage work has increased a whopping 94% over the past two decades. In the GTA and Hamilton, over half of workers are in precarious jobs, and it's not, as the Chamber's letter suggests, because they like the "flexibility". The proportion of workers precariously employed is likely higher here in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound.
The Chamber's letter even uses out of date government data (from 2010, when our dollar was inflated by the oil boom) to claim labour costs are too high. The Chamber's benchmark is the US, a country with no government-sponsored health care and an appalling level of income inequality.
The Chamber asks the Province to subject "the proposed reforms in the final report of the Changing Workplaces Review to an economic impact analysis". In fact, there are decades of research into the impact of poverty wages (the current minimum wage is a poverty wage) on workers, their families and the economy. That research is very clear: pay people enough to live on and let workers organize to protect themselves.
