Minimum wage

[beeblez]

So this issue has been getting on my nerves a bit lately, but I want to suggest a crazy assbackwards idea about minimum wage laws. I don't take credit for inventing this idea, I'm sure it's been thought of before and I very likely heard it from somewhere else and I just can't rememember. Anyway, there are about 261 working days in a year, lets

Comments

[anonymous]

I think it's a neat idea Keith. It'd work out to around $12 an hour, although if our goal is actually to keep people above the poverty line, we might have to go a bit higher.

Two thoughts though: first, the poverty line falls at different places for different people. Think about a single parent - clearly they'd need to earn more than a single person in order to keep themself and their child/children above the poverty line. Second, I think there's one other major factor that plays into our understanding of the whole poverty line idea, and that is housing. According to statscan, who measures all this poverty line stuff, anyone who spends more than 1/3 of their income on housing is highly likely to fall below the poverty line. Doing that math, if we put the average housing cost of a Vancouverite at $700 (which, let's face it, is WAY low), minimum wage would have to be in the $13.25 range (given a 160 hour work month).

-Sasha
P.S. Hi!

[beeblez]

The housing issue occurred to me. I poked around a bit and we do have different poverty lines that scale depending on the housing costs of the community, but you can't really tie minimum wage to that. Again, I hear you with the single parent issue, that knocks the poverty line up about another 8000 a year in a city, and it would be grossly unethical (not to mention bad policy) to tie someone's wage to their family situation. It's certainly a more complex problem that can be reduced to a 3 variable equation. But damn, wouldn't it be a good start? It's no replacement for well funded social programs and a drastically improved public education system and anything else that tries to work on the social causes that underlie poverty.

But wouldn't it be something?

[beeblez]

Also, for some reason I can't reply in your journal. Blogspot seems to not like comments today.

[anonymous]

It often doesn't, moody bastard that it is.

My point was mostly that we really badly need something to go on with this city's housing situation too, as you said. A minimum wage in the $12 to $13 range would sure be a good start.