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EXCERPTS
Ontario's economy chugs along on the backs of 1 million wage slaves.
These are people - one-twelfth of the province's population - who earn $10 an hour or less. And they've been earning those meagre salaries for years.
They work in stores and fast food counters; they clean offices and make up hotel beds; they are telemarketers and home-care workers.
Teenagers who sling burgers for spending money are just a tiny proportion of those who toil at the bottom of the pay scale. Most are middle-aged. They are new Canadians. They are single parents. They are visible minorities. They are disabled.
For them, low wages are not starting salaries but a permanent way of life.
One of the main policies dragging them down is Ontario's minimum wage. At $6.85 an hour, it acts like an anchor on the incomes of all low-wage workers.
Ontario Liberals and the New Democrats propose raising the minimum wage to $8 an hour - the Liberals in four years, the NDP immediately - and have made it an issue during this provincial election. As well, a coalition of social agencies, unions and financial experts is waging a public information campaign to gain support for improved wages, seeking a minimum wage increase to $10 an hour.
Experts like Doug Peters, former chief economist for the Toronto-Dominion Bank, argue that since the poorest workers spend all their money on the necessities of life, paying them more will increase everyone's purchasing power.
Jim Stanford, economist for the Canadian Auto Workers union, says prices of a lot of goods and services are subsidized by low wage workers, "because we can get away with paying them measly sums for working."
Boosting the minimum wage would affect not only those 250,000 workers earning $6.85 an hour but the hundreds of thousands of other low wage workers who haven't seen a raise in years because their earnings are pegged to it.
The biggest impacts of low wages are the stress, overwork and uncertainty that bedevil the lives of those earning little.
Many work two jobs to make ends meet, take all the overtime they can or live in substandard housing. They weather frequent layoffs, odd hours, unpaid holidays and a host of other difficulties associated with these precarious jobs. How, for instance, do you arrange child care if you don't know when you will be working from one week to the next?
- reprinted from Toronto Star