Pay people properly who do the important work

Re A living wage for janitors is the right thing to do, May 18

Emma Teitel’s article is right on the money. I am sure that essential front-line workers and support staff are tired of hearing all the thanks that are coming their way from the public, the government and large corporations.

The real, meaningful, long-term way to thank essential workers, who put their lives on the line every day during this pandemic, is to pay them.

This is the lowest paid work in society, done frequently by women.

Talk is cheap, but a big boost in wages across the board would begin to redress decades of neglect and exploitation of these workers who are critical to our economy.

It is time to stop paying CEOs big salaries for running companies efficiently and start paying the people who matter.

It is time to not only pay janitors a living wage, but nurses, teachers, ECE and child-care workers, PSWs, handicapped support staff, retail clerks and on and on.

This pandemic has revealed who really makes our society run, from sanitation workers to hotel cleaning staff, and it is about time that we stopped exploiting them so that corporations can make bigger profits.

These people are the backbone of our society who do what the rest of us will not.

The same is true of migrants who are brought in from Mexico and Jamaica to do all kinds of jobs that Canadians won’t, from vegetable and fruit harvesters to packing lobster, because of the low wages.

Precarious work just doesn’t cut it any more, as the pandemic has revealed.

The long-term-care corps recently released their financial results showing they paid billions to shareholders and CEOs while running their care homes, where the majority of people have died, on shoe-string budgets.

It is time that they started putting people first and profits last for a change.

Robert Bahlieda, Newmarket