Saying 2.5 years without an increase is long enough, the B.C. Federation of Labour is calling on the provincial government to raise the minimum wage to $15 from $10.25.
“We are calling for $15 in 2015,” said B.C. Federation president Irene Lanzinger in an interview. “The [government] may decide to phase in an increase, but we say we need a dramatic increase immediately if we are to address some of our poverty issues.”
Only Alberta and Saskatchewan at $10.20 an hour and the Northwest Territories at $10 have lower minimum wages in Canada. The highest minimum wage is $11 an hour in Nunavut.
The organization has launched a “Fight for $15” campaign, which on Thursday (January 15) included a rally in downtown Victoria at Bay Centre and an information campaign at Skytrain stations and post-secondary campuses in Vancouver.
The Victoria rally is the first of several, with more planned for the 15th of each month, said organizer Tara Ehrcke.
“It’s not acceptable in a wealthy province to have people earning a wage below the poverty level,” she said. B.C.’s $10.25 minimum wage is below both the $13-an-hour wage considered to be the poverty line and the $17.95 an hour “living wage” in Victoria, she said.
Lanzinger said a minimum wage increase is good for the economy. “We say if you run a small business you should want your employees to earn enough to live above the poverty line. Those people earning will spend it all in the community, at the grocery store, on rent, at the corner store and the drug store and if they’re lucky maybe a restaurant or a movie, which they can’t do at $10.25,” she said.
But small businesses, which often bristle at the mention of increasing the minimum wage, say a significant increase could have the unintended consequence of reducing available hours for staff or even jobs.
“What [the B.C. Federation of Labour] is asking for would do serious damage to small business in B.C.,” said Richard Truscott, provincial director of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. “You could make good arguments for small incremental increases in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation perhaps, but to see a nearly 50% increase overnight would do enormous damage to our economy.
“Their hearts may be in the right place but they need to give their heads a shake.”
Greg Wilson, the Retail Council of Canada’s director of government relations, said rather than making a huge jump, B.C. should index the wage with something like the consumer price index, as is done in Nova Scotia and Ontario. “Our members like the predictability of annual increases based on a formula,” he said.
Wilson said youth stand to get hurt the most if the wage increases dramatically as they will be the first to get cut.
In a statement, B.C. Jobs Minister Shirley Bond said the government is not considering an increase to $15.
“The average hourly wage in B.C. today for adults is over $24 an hour, and the youth average hourly wage is over $14 an hour. I think we certainly recognize that there are challenges for those individuals earning minimum wage, but we’ve also seen the number of workers earning minimum wage between 2012 and 2013 drop in B.C.,” Bond said.
“It’s also important to realize that over half of those individuals earning minimum wage are youth, and of that number, half of those are at home with their parents.”
Bond said the government will meet with business and labour groups to get advice. “Our government promised to raise the minimum wage and we did just that. Before 2011, B.C.’s minimum wage hadn’t been increased for 10 years and since then it has been raised three times,” she said.
