A $10 Minimum Wage

There is a campaign underway in Ontario to raise the minimum wage to $10/hr. I think this is an excellent idea, because it simply is not possible for people to live on $8/hr (the current general minimum wage in Ontario) in many parts of the province. If anyone is interested in my living expenses calculations for Toronto related to the minimum wage, leave a comment and I will post more details of my reasoning. Suffice it to say, rents are so high in many cities in Toronto that even working 40 hours per week (and very few minimum or just-above-minimum wage jobs give 40 hrs/wk) will not allow people to live, even if heavy use is made of food banks. Obviously, $10/hr will not allow people to live comfortably, but it is a dramatic improvement on what has gone before and will help people have some degree of stability in their lives.

The Ontario NDP, the Federal NDP, many unions and a vast plethora of community and citizen groups are pushing this effort forward. A good measure of a society is how it treats the most abject of it's citizens. And right now we are treating the poor of our society like crap, to be frank. Raising the minimum wage to $10/hr won't make that better, but it would be a good first step.

Now, the right wing will whinge about how raising the minimum wage like this will cause the sky to fall and cause every small business in Ontario to go out of business. Well guess what; doctor's said that socialized healthcare would cause the end of the medical system and that didn't happen. And business has been claiming that every increase to the minimum wage since the invention of such a thing will have catastrophic effects on business, and the economy has continued much as it ever has, cyclical as always. Frankly, a lot of the business sector is full of shit and not to be trusted on these issues.

Another objection that the right-wing will raise is that most people who earn minimum wage are teenagers living at home who don't need a raise. Nice try. That may be strictly speaking true, but a raise in the minimum wage from $8 to $10 would also help every person making between $8.01 and $9.99 per hour. And that is a lot of people in Ontario alone.

This is a good idea, and the reason the right fights it so strenuously is because they need a demoralized and abjected working class to produce wealth for them. As Ambrose Bierce said:

Corporation, noun: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit, without individual responsibility.

He was on to something there. Capitalists don't care about people, they care about profit. This is to put the cart before the horse in a dramatic manner. People should come before profit.

Cheers

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