The mood outside Dufferin Mall on the afternoon of Saturday, September 14, is festive, with an Afro-Brazilian drum band banging out songs, kids playing carnival games and free popcorn and samosas for the crowd of about 60.
It looks more like a street party than a protest, but the message of the event, part of an action stretching across a dozen Ontario cities, is serious enough. Poorly paid workers and their supporters have gathered to demand an increase to the provincial minimum wage, which has been frozen at $10.25 since 2010.
At pay that low, advocates say, the province’s 534,000 full-time minimum-wage labourers are living 19 per cent below the poverty line. A bump to $14 an hour would allow them to climb 10 per cent above it.
“It’s not enough to live on. We’ve got people trying to decide whether to pay the rent, buy food or get new clothes for their kids. It’s simply impossible,” says Edward Lantz of ACORN, part of a coalition that includes the Workers Action Centre, the Toronto and York Region Labour Council, OCAP and six others.
In addition to the $3.75 raise, participants are asking the province to tie the minimum wage to inflation. Ontario is one of only three Canadian jurisdictions without a formula for determining regular wage increases to reflect the climbing cost of living.
The protests come as the province’s special advisory group is holding hearings on the wage regime across the province. The six-person panel – which includes representatives from labour, business and academia – is expected to release its findings by early 2014.
But the opposition NDP says further study is extraneous and that a higher minimum wage is overdue. The party’s poverty critic, Parkdale-High Park MPP Cheri DiNovo, says the party isn’t yet ready to commit to a figure. Still, “we are absolutely supportive of keeping the minimum wage at a level where people can survive and live without going to food banks,” she says.
Despite the common stereotype, those stuck with poverty wages aren’t just teenagers working summer jobs, says the Workers Action Centre’s Sonia Singh. Many are older and have families, and are also disproportionately women, immigrants and people of colour.
The country’s largest private-sector union believes that these low-income earners wouldn’t be the only ones to benefit from an increase in the minimum wage. In a submission to the provincial panel earlier this month, economists with newly created labour giant Unifor argued that better pay at the bottom would have a “trickle-up impact” on higher-paid workers as well.
“There are people in a lot of jobs where the employer sets the wage not at the minimum, but in relation to the minimum,” explains Unifor economist Jim Stanford. “They’re trying to get a certain calibre of worker, a certain level of stability or retention, and to do that they know they have to pay $3 above the minimum, or maybe $5 above. So those workers will get a raise as well whenever the minimum wage goes up.”
Stanford says an across-the-board pay raise would help counteract one of the most detrimental after-effects of the 2008 downturn. Although economies across North America are recovering, he argues, most of the jobs coming back are low-paid positions in service and retail sectors. Frustration with these so-called McJobs led to unprecedented strike action by U.S. fast food workers in August.
“We’re seeing a labour market that is increasingly producing lousy jobs: low-wage jobs, precarious jobs, part-time jobs, contract jobs,” Stanford says. “It’s not going to get any better unless we put in place rules and structures to force it to get better.”
Armine Yalnizyan, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, believes Queen’s Park has no choice but to raise the minimum wage – it’s just a matter of when and by how much. She contends that doing so would benefit employers as well as employees. Simply put, if workers make more, they will buy more, she says.
“It’s often said that businesses create jobs. Well, in fact, it’s consumers who create jobs,” Yalnizyan says. “If you raise the minimum wage, then [workers] will have more purchasing power. That is primarily what propels our economy.”
“If you keep throttling purchasing power, particularly of the people who are buying the cheapest stuff out there, you’re going to lose your sales. It’s that simple,” she says.
The Retail Council of Canada declined to comment for this article. But the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, while cautioning against sudden jumps in the minimum wage, supports tying it to the Consumer Price Index in order to keep pace with inflation.
That would “bring predictability to the process” and “allow businesses to plan for increases in their labour costs,” said OCC president Allan O’Dette in a release last week.
Outside Dufferin Mall on Saturday, the colourful logo of low-wage retailer Toys “R” Us in the background, Estina Sebastien gets emotional when she talks about struggling to make ends meet on $10.25 an hour. She put herself through a year of schooling to earn her certification as a personal support worker, but she has only been able to find part-time work and now splits her time between two temp agencies.
“I’m almost in tears now because it’s depressing. Living like this, people will tell you that they can suffer from mental health issues,” says Sebastien, who immigrated to Canada six years ago and has two children aged 16 and 20. “My choice is to deny myself everything. I make do with the basic bare things in order to give my children.”
Sebastien’s friend Julia McDonald is in a similarly tough place. She does factory work, and she says it’s a strain even for a single person like her to survive on a stagnant minimum wage when the price of daily necessities continues to rise.
“It’s ridiculous, because every year the landlord increases the rent, TTC increases its fare,” she says. “You can’t even afford to buy groceries.”
TOP FIVE REASONS FOR A MINIMUM WAGE BOOST
1. Minimum wages have been frozen for three years at $10.25 per hour while consumer prices have increased by over 7 per cent.
2. Relative to average wages and average hourly productivity, minimum wages are significantly lower today than they were in the 70s.
3. Almost half of all employees in the GTA work at precarious jobs with irregular and inadequate hours.
4. The living wage benchmark for a family of four in Ontario is two full-time breadwinners earning $18 an hour.
5. An increase will generate more spending power and economic growth.
Source: Unifor’s submission to Ontario’s Minimum Wage Advisory Panel, by Jim Stanford and Jordan Brennan
bens@nowtoronto.com | @bens
