Prices will rise regardless of minimum wages

Interesting how there’s such an outcry against minimum wage workers getting a pay increase.

What is the problem — that they are ingrates and should be happy with their lot in life? After all, this is ruggedly individualistic Calgary, city of the big shoulders, to borrow from poet Carl Sandburg, where all you have to do is pull yourself up by your entrepreneurial bootstraps.

Oh, the minimum wage is costing employers more and forcing them to raise their prices? Sorry, I don’t buy it. Those prices would have gone up anyway.

Four years ago, long before a $15 minimum wage was a gleam in anyone’s eye, a friend and I went for lunch at a local family-restaurant franchise. We ordered fish and chips, iced tea for him and a Coke for me, and he added coffee and apple pie to his order afterward.

The tab for lunch for two people came to $65 before the tip. That’s just ridiculous. This establishment couldn’t blame a hike in the minimum wage for its exorbitant prices, because there was no increase.

Prices at restaurants and other small businesses have always gone up, regardless of the minimum wage. To blame those increases on the NDP government’s commitment to give the working poor the ability to pay for increasing rent and grocery costs is a non-starter.

Look instead at the supply chain. Restaurants and other businesses have to raise their prices because the companies that produce the ingredients or raw material of whatever product or service they are offering, are raising their own prices. It’s a classic domino effect.

However, some things about the current griping just don’t add up. Remember back in 2007, when there was such a shortage of workers that fast-food franchises were so desperate, they were offering wages of $20 and up an hour? Nobody complained back then that a $20-anhour wage was putting them out of business or causing prices to skyrocket; rather, they feared going out of business if they couldn’t get enough staff.

Meanwhile, in April of last year, after two annual increases to the minimum wage, citing figures from Stats Can, the Herald reported that in March 2017 alone, 20,000 jobs had been created in Alberta: “Employers in the services sector ... have been growing and were responsible for three-quarters of the March employment gains, having added an estimated 15,000 jobs.”

This, after the minimum wage rose in 2015 from $10.20 an hour to $11.20 an hour, before moving to $12.20 an hour in October 2016.

In October 2017, when the minimum wage went from $12.20 to $13.60 an hour, Labour Minister Christina Gray said that “nearly 300,000 Albertans earn less than $15 an hour.”

According to the Alberta Minimum Wage Profile, current as of March 2018, 27 per cent of minimum wage earners are married, dual earners with children, and 22 per cent are married, childless dual earners.

“Unattached individuals” — the category into which teenagers would fall — made up 14.2 per cent of these workers. Clearly, the adult, married, working poor make up the biggest category of minimum wage workers, not teens in summer jobs, as is conveniently supposed.

In November 2017, when much griping accompanied the previous month’s minimum wage hike, ATB Financial released a study titled Restaurant and Bar Receipts Continue to Impress, that stated: “August’s total was more than $1 million higher than the previous record set the previous month ... For four months in a row, Alberta has reached continuous record highs. Since the previous record set in May 2016 ... receipts have grown by nearly $9 million. What’s most surprising is that receipts from bars and restaurants have grown to new heights even amid the tougher economic climate.”

So “receipts” rose despite periodic rises in the minimum wage for the past two years. Seems everything has a right to increase, except the working poor’s ability to pay for the bare necessities of life.

Nobody complained ... a $20-an-hour wage was putting them out of business.