Scientific studies suggest that a four-day workweek could make people happier and more productive, but more research is needed to conclude whether it would be the best idea for everyone.
How do your savings compare to those of the 1 percent?
CNN takes data that says the median top 1% has over a million dollars in their accounts and the median for the bottom 20% has zero-and their solution is to lecture poor people about savings rates.
Just as the Liberals know their hydro scheme is costly, they are also well aware their minimum wage hike will kill jobs
Let me destroy this article point by point, why not?
...Tim Hudak wisely proposed... reducing public sector employment by 100,000 jobs...
So very wise as this was likely the issue that actually sunk his campaign. Because where were his cuts going to magically materialize? Prisons in Ontario are understaffed. Hospitals are understaffed. Nursing homes are understaffed. All leading to Ontario having the third smallest public sector in the country proportionately. Reducing front line staff only makes the problems worse, not better.
...Wynne’s own plan to raise the minimum wage, which is likely to destroy far more than 100,000 jobs...
This is, to put it diplomatically, horseshit. For several reasons. Every single minimum wage meta-analysis says pretty much the opposite. Raising the minimum wage at worst, doesn’t affect employment rates at all. Of the most recent studies, raising the minimum wage creates more employment. Whether in several states, in just Seattle, and most importantly even in Canada.
The other misconception is that any of this was somehow Wynne’s plan. This announcement actually represents a major flip-flop as she was more than content at the beginning of her term to subject minimum wage workers to a perpetuity of poverty with a paltry $11/hr even though a living wage in Ontario is at the very least $14.85/hr, and in Toronto is a bank account emptying $18.52/hr. Wynne only made this announcement now because the ONDP made it part of their next election platform and she’s trying desperately to improve her polling numbers.
That report, authored by minimum wage expert and University of Toronto economist Morley Gunderson, warned against raising the minimum wage by pointing out that Canadian studies generally estimate that a 10-per-cent minimum wage hike would reduce youth employment by around three to six per cent.
I’ve already pointed to studies saying that’s wrong, but here’s more.
And remember that the 80,000 to 155,000 estimate is only for the jobs lost by young workers, aged 15 to 24. Add in all the jobs that will be lost by older workers as well...
Now, hold on. Why did Lau all of the sudden stop quoting Gunderson and switch over to speculation? Oh, right, because amongst older workers Gunderson calculated an increase in employment. But why let such inconvenient data get in the way of a good bloviating?
...there is no telling how much high the economic casualty toll might skyrocket.
There is no telling how much exaggerated rhetoric to which Lau is going to resort to prove the sky is in very real danger of falling any second now for realsies this time.
...it cited a 2011 study which found a 10-per-cent minimum wage increase was “associated with a 4%–6% increase in the percentage of families living under Low Income Cut Offs...
I would undoubtedly dispute that report if I could find it, but even if I accept it at face value after taking all of the data into account, the panel concluded that “although raising the minimum wage would reduce poverty for some, its overall impact on poverty as a whole would be limited.” Not the best argument for my position, but certainly not the disaster Lau expects to be the case.
But [the Liberals] have evidently decided that the massive job losses are worth the electoral support they will receive from the public sector unions
So Hudak promising job losses was “wise” but the incredibly unlikely job losses from Wynne’s proposal are “dire.” Try to square that circle, folks.
A sixth-grade teacher at the Young Women's STEAM Academy in Dallas was fired after word of her prior profession as a porn star spread throughout her school district. Resa Woodward, who performed under the not very sexy-sounding pseudonym "Robyn Foster" nearly 20 years ago, was fired last November after district officials received an anonymous tip about her work as an adult district. What's truly messed up is that although the Dallas Morning News reports that a subsequent internal review cleared her of policy violations, Woodward, who has worked in education for 15 years, is still out of a job. “I taught in an all-girls STEAM Academy that was all about empowerment for women,” Woodward told the Dallas Morning News. “The sad thing is that if these girls find out that I’m being punished for something that I did nearly 20 years ago and had no control of and fought to get out of, well, what does that say about empowerment?” The New York Post reported on Woodward's predicament: Woodward told the paper that she was forced into pornography — saying “that involvement was not of my own choosing” — while living with an older man during a tough time financially. She eventually got herself out of the situation and finished school before becoming a teacher for the Dallas ISD, which serves roughly 160,000 students from pre-K through 12th grade.But district officials got a tip in March claiming that Woodward worked in porn under the alias Robyn Foster, a name active in the business from 2001 and 2004, credited with 16 movies, according to a web-based adult film database cited by the Morning News.The tipster, according to a report, was concerned because they didn’t want their child “exposed to things like this,” claiming Woodward was trying to deceive students and parents alike.According to the internal report, Woodward claimed to have stopped working in the adult entertainment industry in 2001, and indicated that she suspected a spiteful man may have been behind the anonymous tip. Via The New York Post,Woodward told the Dallas Morning News that she wrote a post on Facebook last fall about a drunken driver that angered another man who claimed to be associated with the Libertarian Party in another state due to his beliefs about police. That man then detailed her past on social media websites, Woodward said. Although the district's initial investigation found that Woodward 's "past participation" in pornography didn't warrant the termination of her employment, she told the paper that they decided to "pursue termination because it became public. She has reportedly filed an appeal with the Texas Education Agency, but an independent hearing was not granted because it filed improperly, a spokeswoman told the Dallas Morning News. Let's hope that isn't some sort of workaround to keep her from continuing her career as a teacher---dare to dream, people.
The teacher in question is named Resa Woodward, she works at a school where union membership is illegal so she had no job security. This is deplorable.
Don’t forget that the entire SNAP program amounts to about 0.1% of the discretionary budget. So really the fraud amounts to 0.01% of all government spending. Or about the same amount of money spent every 20 hours on the War on Terror.
To the people that cry, “Make minimum wage $15/hr and put larger taxes on big corporations,” here is something for you:
“Of course one government policy leads to the next. If you raise the minimum wage, then it is going to raise the rent. When you raise the rent, you’re going to have to build affordable housing. When you have to build affordable housing, you have to tax people to build the affordable housing. When you tax people to build affordable housing, people move out of the city, and you have to raise taxes on the people who remain in the city. This is how you hollow out the economy of a major metropolitan area in the United States.”
“So what if we tax the big corporations for the affordable housing instead?,” you may ask. Then the big corporations move and hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost at all skill levels. When all these jobs are lost, the upper and higher middle class move to where the corporations go. When these people move, you draw a new line for poverty and beg for job creation again for those that cannot afford to move. Now the United States economy is even worse, and you don’t have the rich corporations to bail out your sorry ass anymore.
“Okay, so what if the whole world adopts our scheme so that the corporations can’t move and will always be subject to a higher tax?,” you may ask. The response is simple: that is a utopia, it won’t exist, and it will never exist. You will always have countries “poorer” than others; countries where labor is cheaper; countries where corporations can profit higher; and that’s where they will go if you make your country less suitable to their desires. Let me guess, you’re also a feminist who cries for both equality and to be a protected class? An SJW who wants racism and bigotry off our streets and to annihilate the idea that some people have ill motives? I’m not sure what world you live in, but minimum wage is and never will be longer a livable wage. You’ll just have to do better than that.
So because high inflation was disproven, and growing unemployment was disproven, now we’re going with higher rents. Sounds like corporatists are really starting to grasp at straws but, sure, why not? I’ll bite. First, this:
There is currently no state at all where one person earning minimum wage can afford an apartment without working more than 40 hours. In California alone, you could double the state minimum wage and people would not quite be able to afford the apartments they already have, so I don’t know how many new renters you think you’re going to create with a higher minimum wage. And last time I checked, rental rates were not dependent at all on personal income anyway, but rental availability. So if the goal is to increase the number of vacancies in the city and people can afford the housing without assistance, you don’t have to build affordable housing at all, just housing. Which rental property companies would be more than happy to provide if all these new renters do magically appear.
Also, capital flight has never been proven to my satisfaction. California has some of the highest taxes in the country, and Kansas some of the lowest. Yet, I can’t help but observe there are disproportionately more millionaires and billionaires in California compared to Kansas. You’re acting like money is the only consideration in deciding where to live. Unemployment hollows out a city, not high taxes, and the minimum wage ultimately helps employment, so that argument holds no water either.
And frankly I’m sick of supply-side economics bullshit. Consumers drive the economy, not the corporations, so if these cry-baby companies want to leave, at this point I say let them. I’m sure the competitors they leave behind won’t be shedding any tears as they capture all that new business.
Both research and BC experience support NDP's plan to boost it over four years.
NDP leader John Horgan’s first big election promise – a $15 minimum wage – has been greeted with an eerie silence from the usual suspects in the low-wage lobby.
A B.C. Chamber of Commerce spokesperson expressed some concern. Energy Minister Bill Bennett proclaimed the government’s opposition to having the highest minimum wage in Canada.
But Horgan’s recent commitment to move from the lowest minimum wage in Canada to the highest has mostly escaped criticism.
Perhaps that’s because the groups pushing to keep wages low have cried wolf before, and been caught out.
When Premier Christy Clark announced increases to the minimum wage in 2011, the usual suspects rang the alarm bells.
Never mind that the wage had been frozen at $8 an hour for a decade. Clark’s minimum wage plans would bring disaster, the extremist business groups said.
Clark’s overdue increases raised the minimum wage from $8 to $8.75 on May 1, 2011, with two more increases taking it to $10.25 within a year – about 28 per cent in total.
Most of the business community accepted the need for an increase to a wage that left people in poverty. And while the minimum wage isn’t a perfect tool, there is a consensus that increases in the wage reduce both inequality and the number of people living in poverty.
But some lobby groups issued warnings of economic catastrophe when Clark announced plans to increase the minimum wage. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) predicted 32,760 to 199,560 lost jobs in the province. (That’s based on the CFIB projection of jobs lost due a 10 per cent increase in the minimum wage.)
The Fraser Institute predicted job losses of 26,097 to 57,194. In an op-ed column for the Vancouver Sun, the institute’s spokespeople were more specific. “By our estimates, hiking the minimum wage to $10.25 an hour from the current rate of $8 an hour will result in a loss of upwards of 46,000 jobs for young workers,” they wrote.
And they were dead wrong.
In April 2011, the month before the first of the three minimum wage increases, 2,273,000 British Columbians were employed.
By August 2012 – 16 months after the first increase, and four months after the full 28 per cent increase had taken effect – 2,323,000 people were working in the province.
Employment didn’t fall as a result of the minimum wage increase. More people were working.
Opponents could still argue that jobs were lost, and the number of people working would have been even higher if the minimum wage had stayed at $8.
But not credibly. Job growth in B.C. over that period was 2.2 per cent, compared with a national average of 1.3 per cent. If the CFIB’s mid-point projections were to be believed, then employment in B.C. would have increased 5.5 per cent if not for the minimum wage hike – more than four times the Canadian average. No serious economist would suggest that was realistic.
The evidence was that the minimum wage increase had no material effect on employment.
I’m sorry, but I don’t really understand the whole “raising minimum wage” thing. I mean, if you raise minimum wage, won’t prices go up? And then every wage above minimum wage goes up too? And then people demand higher minimum wages again. Can someone please explain what I’m missing?
You’re missing what labour costs contribute in terms of overall costs in business. In many businesses, labour averages out to about 20% of total costs. That’s everyone from the front-line worker earning $20K at minimum wage, to the owner earning $150K. Ignore the owner’s salary, and costs are closer to 12% of the total. So now you know that for every $10 meal you buy, $1.20 is paid to the staff.
Now let’s be absolutely crazy and double everyone’s salary. Staff now earns $40K. To cover that new cost, the price of your meal rises from $10 to $11.20. But if you’re also earning minimum wage, your paycheck just doubled at well. You now have 100% more money but prices only went up 12%. You’re still 88% ahead of where you were before the raise.
It baffles me that people still defend raising the minimum wage when it’s a proven fact at this point (see Seattle) that raising the min. wage does nothing but hurt low-skilled workers and increase unemployment in the exact demographics that its “supposed” to help.
It baffles me that people still believe the often debunked talking point that higher wages somehow create more unemployment when the exact opposite is true.
Canada lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to Mexico and other countries thanks to NAFTA. It's made so dependent on the US for trade that every time the US screws up their economy, it usually drags Canada along with it. At the same time, the US is pretty much using our country as their landfill when it comes to the importation of industrial wastes. The immediate effects of NAFTA on wages were a reduction of income throughout the 90s for the bottom 80% while the top 20% saw their incomes greatly increase. The absolute worst section in the NAFTA is the one that gives multinational corporations more power than our government, the Chapter 11 corporate sovereignty section. Thanks to Chapter 11, Canada became the most sued partner under NAFTA. We the taxpayers have had to shell out $172 million in lost NAFTA cases so far to these corporations, and we're still fighting many more cases with the potential of having to pay out $6 billion more because we gave foreign companies the power to overrule our own laws designed to protect workers and the environment. And we're about to give away more power under CETA, and more under the TPP giving companies all over the world veto power over our democracy. Unless you're rich, free trade has been a disaster for you.
The final statement in that video is completely backwards. The minimum wage today has less buying power than in 2009 when it was introduced according to the calculator they used. Because in 2015 you needed $7.93 to purchase what cost $7.25 in 2009, yet people are still only earning $7.25 an hour. Inflation doesn't increase buying power last I checked.
And I'll also say that 1968 was chosen as the benchmark year, because the value of the minimum wage was accelerating (more or less) up to that time. Because why shouldn't wages outpace inflation? CEO wages had grossly outpaced inflation between 1965 and 2013 (14031% nominal raise vs 663% inflation), so what have CEOs been doing that workers haven't? (Spoiler: It was lobbying to outsource production overseas and suppress domestic workers' wages.)
And no one can tell me the minimum wage was bad for the economy because between the introduction of the minimum wage in 1993 and the peak in 1968, while a worker's nominal wages went up 540%, the GDP exploded with 1554% nominal growth. Seriously, the people who are telling you that raising the minimum wage is a bad idea are lying through their teeth.
stormborns
pixelskylines
kianamaiart
annaxmalina
dededos
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
baratheonpilled
