Hypocrisy of minimum wage hike opposition
The Ontario government is committed to increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2019. It’s still hardly a livable income but at long last something is being done to remedy the insultingly low current level of a little over $11.
Of course it’s partly a political decision intent on winning votes, and it may well be argued that consultations have been inadequate and the jump relatively sudden. But none of this justifies the hysteria, anger and seemingly constant barrage from critics convinced that Armageddon is just around the corner.
The economic arguments are various and often at odds, and while there are competing precedents, the consensus is that the economy will be boosted and not blasted by the change. More to the point of course, it will give countless people more of a chance to pay the rent and feed themselves. Any society that regards it- self as civilized should surely allow its lowest-paid citizens at least a modicum of hope and dignity.
Small business owners are worried that they may have to fire people and that’s not a fear that should be dismissed. What should be dismissed, however, are the outlandish and offensive claims being made by corporations, who in fact hire the majority of minimum-wage employees.
Their line seems to be that if governments increase the minimum wage, their vast profits will slightly diminish so, as a response, they will fire people, such as cashiers. And if anyone believes that being a cashier is easy they certainly have never done it. Nor will a minimum-wage increase make a devastating dent on corporate profits.
Do we seriously believe that investors and owners will suddenly be going hungry or — God forbid — have to send their children out to work at minimum-wage jobs?
My wife is a minimum-wage worker. She has an MA, is an experienced educator, but after the children left home, she found it difficult to find work. Frankly, we need the money. We’ve done OK financially and are much luckier than some, but neither of us came from wealthy families.
She’s often at work before 5 a.m. and on her feet the whole time. Some of her colleagues are young but not all — only around 18 per cent of minimum wage workers in Ontario are teenagers and up to a third of people who use food banks are working adults.
Reality is a swift and harsh teacher. Those on minimum wage often have partners earning the same, are frequently educated but perhaps not born in Canada, simply can’t find other jobs, have been laid off in early middle age without a pension, or have not had the opportunities enjoyed by others.
But there’s none so condemning of them and knowledgeable about their situation as those who have never been there, have no genuine involvement in the debate, yet embrace the propaganda of the conservative and the corporate like it was some warm, comforting safety blanket.
The response seldom has anything to do with economics, but is about control and even humiliation. Critics believe that those earning minimum wage somehow deserve to go without, need to pay a price for some imagined sin of failure or lack of ambition.
Minimum wage is in their eyes punitive. Listen to talk radio, read right-wing columnists and we see a contemporary Calvinism, a perverse form of predestination where the undeserving poor need to know their place.
It’s also about self-perception and selfregard. The “other” has to be marginalized in this visceral need to prove that those who don’t work for minimum wage are somehow superior. It’s a vulgar mantra: I am well-paid therefore I am. Nothing else seems to explain the almost obsessive opposition to what is an ethically robust as well as economically compelling argument.
When, for example, it’s revealed that business leaders are to receive bonuses on already astronomical salaries we never hear that this will lead to inflation or the need to reduce the number of bosses. On the contrary, the same types who oppose minimum wage increases explain that only such munificence will attract the best, even though the evidence indicates otherwise.
In many ways this is a pivotal moment. Stand up with those who earn little and deserve more, or sit down with those comfortable with the status quo. Thanks but I’ll stand.
Critics believe that those earning minimum wage somehow deserve to go without, need to pay a price for some imagined sin of failure or lack of ambition