Wednesday, August 15, 2018

The Minimum Wage (Non-) Problem.

SometimesALedeIsJustALede
AndSometimesItIsSomethingMoreVille


From the top of Rachell Younglai's recent piece in the Globe and Mail:

Ontario’s jobless rate hit an 18-year low in July, as the country’s largest economy continued to churn out jobs despite this year’s hefty hike in the minimum wage.

When the province raised the mandatory hourly rate 21 per cent to $14 in January, businesses and their trade groups warned of employment losses. But, six months later, Statistics Canada data show that has not happened.

In fact, Ontario’s labour market is on fire.

The province added 61,000 new jobs in July and the jobless rate fell from 5.9 per cent to 5.4 per cent − the lowest level since 2000, according to the Statscan monthly Labour Force Survey released on Friday. Over all, the country added 54,000 net new jobs in July. The national jobless rate fell from 6 per cent to 5.8 per cent, reverting back to where it has been for most of the year...



Gosh.

How can this be possible given all the screaming and screeching from the usual suspects that got big time proMedia wurlitzer coverage in the run-up to Ontario's minimum wage hike?



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Of course, all that screaming, screeching and wurlitzering helped make it possible for one employer to play the indentured servant card.
And one can only wonder if some of the reverse-screeching that has been going on 'round here recently might be eased by another immediate bump in the Lotuslandian MinWage?
Tip O' the Toque to Alberta poli-blogger extraordinaire David Climenhaga who has much, much more.


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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Also worth reading (from the BlogCrawl...)

Doomsayers, Chicken Littles and Conservatives get it wrong on the impact of minimum wage increases
- by David Climenhaga

https://albertapolitics.ca/2018/08/doomsayers-chicken-littles-and-conservatives-get-it-wrong-on-the-impact-of-minimum-wage-increases/

RossK said...

Thanks Anon--

Actually linked-to in footer...

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Lew said...

"It is a serious national evil that any class of His Majesty's subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions. It was formerly supposed that the working of the laws of supply and demand would naturally regulate or eliminate that evil [...and...] ultimately produce a fair price. Where... you have a powerful organisation on both sides... there you have a healthy bargaining.... But where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad, and the bad employer is undercut by the worst... where those conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration."
Winston Churchill MP, Trade Boards Bill, Hansard House of Commons (28 April 1909)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage

As if 1909 isn’t far enough back in history to demonstrate this is an enduring argument perplexing society for longer than the Fraser Institute thinks it should, I note the same article says modern minimum wage laws trace their origin back to the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349.

Tim Horton’s didn’t even have drive-throughs in those days.