They have a $24,000 report that raising minimum wage will cost 100,000s of jobs. In fact bad entrepreneurs will be forced out of business but the customers will move down the street and spend - replacing the jobs. People know this.

An increase at the bottom might inflate 1% but this would be a transfer to the worst paid, who spend -- so there is no net loss of jobs.

These reports are no where near worth $24,000. People know this too.

People are still asleep though. By all reports labour shortages in Calgary have forced Tim Hortons to pay $12 an hour. In this case the market would provide way more social justice and efficiency than government.

The former minimum wage thread ended with a comment that there should be less wage disparity. I read, albiet once only, that the spread between university graduates and highschool graduates in Scandanvia and Japan is much less than it is in America. If you're interested, that might exist.

Meanwhile Canada is a meritocracy. The market for smarter more experienced people keeps wage disparity up.

Michelle closed the minimum wage thread but I could talk about jobs all day, and generally do actually.

[ 22 March 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
The Star is reporting that the Liberal government is going to promise to raise the minimum wage to $10.25.

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All I said, Wiz, is that the market for good skills is strong usually. You can get the market to work for you. This is obvious and just the way it is. I have an opinion about why labour markets don't yo yo but that's another nut.

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You're delusional. I have a university degree and I work a just-above-minimum wage job because that's all there is in my town. Same goes for many of my peers.

I've also lived in Calgary and the thing they don't mention in those articles about $12/hour Tim Horton's jobs is that Calgary is the land of service fees. Everything has a fee, not even the public library.

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Originally posted by Le Téléspectateur:

You're delusional.

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I have a degree as well, in Computer Science. However the market has shrunk in that field and I work as a courier. There are still good jobs for people with excellent skills in IT though. That's what I mean.

[ 22 March 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

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Originally posted by Fidel:
Nobody has really believed in free market mumbo jumbo since at least 1929.

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
[QB]All I said, Wiz, is that the market for good skills is strong usually. You can get the market to work for you. ...snippage...QB]

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Really? I'm in a trade that has a huge "shortage" of skilled workers yet the best I can do is about 50% of what I made 15yrs ago once inflation and the cost of living is factored in. I can't complain though, I make a lot more than most people and have trouble garnering any sympathy.

When I say there's a strong market for good skills I'm thinking of the statistics that show the top 20% are doing better than ever. Some people are doing rather well.

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
For example there's lots of professional and skilled unemployment but these people don't really relate to it as an issue.

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Bruce, you are absolutely right. Not only is there lots of skilled and professional unemployment, there is even more under employment in these areas.

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
U rates being what, unemployment. In Canada here we missed the 2001 recession they had in the USA. The economy just chugged ahead.

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That's because they had conservatives running that economy into the ground with spending on war and excessive tax cuts for wealthy friends of the Republican Party.

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Originally posted by Le Téléspectateur:

I've also lived in Calgary and the thing they don't mention in those articles about $12/hour Tim Horton's jobs is that Calgary is the land of service fees. Everything has a fee, not even the public library.

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[ 05 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

And where has the private sector built affordable housing in the kind of numbers produced in post-war USA, Britain and Canada ?. The private sector needs to be pushed and prodded into allocating so many of the units they build for affordable housing. The tendency is for low income people to move on to other jobs, other cities etc. And once they do that, affordable housing units tend to revert back to market prices and higher rents.

[ 05 April 2007: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

The U.S. Fed targets inflation at 3 to 4 percent -the BoC 1 to 3 percent with 2 as a midpoint. Where is unemployment lower right now, the U.S. or Canada ?.

[ 05 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
Affordable housing. The going rate for two bedroom apartments in Toronto is $1000 a month while new construction is at least $2000 a month. That's the cost structure.

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Meanwhile Canada is a meritocracy.

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Dammit. I'm off to the store now to buy a new bullshit detector.

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Originally posted by HeywoodFloyd:
Taxes are both a federal and provincial responsibility. You want to get affordable rental properties built? The fastest way is to make it profitable for the developers or management companies.

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
Fidel is talking about growing the economy. Be reminded that Canada has job surpluses, is an immigration country and the population has been expanded 8% through immigration in the last decade to mop up the robust growth.

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The 1990's in Canada saw the weakest average job growth rate since the 1930's. How's that for a free trade success story, Bruce ?.

In the 14 years before FTA (1989), Canada's full-time payroll job creation was 2.3 million.

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
As far as I can make out there is no constuction of apartments in Toronto and decades hence when the old stock falls apart there'll be a real shortage of apartments. You can see this coming from years off.

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The NDP predicted as much when Mike Harris borrowed $35 billion to pay for tax cuts to wealthy friends of the party. The Tories didn't build very damn much over two terms, and now both the Ontario Liberals and federal Tories admit to an infrastructure deficit across Canada after what was the industrialized world's worst aggregate economic performance of the last decade acccording to Pierre Fortin and Industry Canada.

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:

Dammit. I'm off to the store now to buy a new bullshit detector.

Mine just got fried.

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Lots of people doing very well in this country actually. What do you think it's for, generosity from capitalistic owners.

Personally I have no idea what such a post refers to. I have worked in a lot of places and the best managers have some problems while the worst workers can't manage their own life let alone run anything. The situation is the bright get paid better for this reason. Everybody lives with this.

[ 06 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 06 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
Canada always was a hewer of wood and drawer of water economy. A bush league foreign owned, branch plant trading economy. To expect stellar performance from it is a mistake.

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Canada has been a chronic underperformer, especially so since FTA-NAFTA. NAFTA is the stupidest trade deal ever signed in the history of the world, and the majority of Canadians voted against both deals in the 80s-90's.

political conservatism = uncompetitive nanny state for rich people propped up by natural resource wealth

[ 06 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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People are still asleep though. By all reports labour shortages in Calgary have forced Tim Hortons to pay $12 an hour. In this case the market would provide way more social justice and efficiency than government.

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Actually, no it doesn't. Not even close. First, the capitalist-dominated market, as history shows, adopts the wholly unsustainable and unjust practice of trying to coercively keep workers' wages as low as possible, while forcing them to spend as much as they can creating markets and economic activity.

As soon as the labour supply begins gets any closer to demand, bosses will again push those rates down.

Add to this, the higher wage rates caused by labour shortages don't take into account the skyrocketing cost of living, which has the effect of lowering the standard of living and making those wage-earners overall poorer.

As Le Téléspectateur says:

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I've also lived in Calgary and the thing they don't mention in those articles about $12/hour Tim Horton's jobs is that Calgary is the land of service fees. Everything has a fee, not even the public library.

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And, believe it or not Heywood Floyd re-enforces:

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The other thing they don't mention is that $12 per hour full time in Calgary is barely enough to rent a place with here. In Calgary $12 IS the effective minimum wage.

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Further supported by Fidel's observation:

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And the City of Calgary reports thousands of homeless people in the city. Apparently there's not enough of the oil profits being sunk into housing and infrastructure out there to attract suffcient workers from outside Wild Rose County

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When interest rates rise (as they surely will) and international energy commodity rates fall (as they will in the next couple years), markets will slow as things get even more unaffordable as jobs are lost, and wages are driven down by bosses, without resolving any of the current hardships (like personal debt and homelessness), unless the government legislates a higher minimum wage rate, and invests money in public housing and infrastructure. That would be more effective in terms of social justice.

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Lots of people doing very well in this country actually. What do you think it's for, generosity from capitalistic owners.

Personally I have no idea what such a post refers to. I have worked in a lot of places and the best managers have some problems while the worst workers can't manage their own life let alone run anything. The situation is the bright get paid better for this reason. Everybody lives with this.

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Well, I see your point of view. But only by employing post hoc reasoning, and enjoying the feed back loop of your tautology.

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Originally posted by Farmpunk:

The common denominator in these labour hungry businesses is that the work is physical and dirty. Ever picked cabbage? Asparagus? Strawberries? (Course not, that's why there's close to 30 000 Mexicans, Trinidads and Jamacians in Ontario every year.

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I think this is one of the failures of NAFTA for Mexican workers. NAFTA negotiators said at the time that increased trade would create a stay-at-home middle class in Mexico. They said if Americans didn't accept NAFTA, then Mexicans would pile in over the border to take American jobs. Mexico's middle class actually became smaller and "worker desperation" increased. NAFTA critics didn't suggest at the time that it would not increase trade, but that the benefits of increased trade would not flow to workers.

And that's true in Canada as the economic pie has increased since NAFTA, with massive exports of energy and raw materials siphoned off to the U.S. CCPA says 80 percent of Canadian families are receiving a smaller share of the national income than 30 years ago. Child poverty in Canada is too high for a country with so much natural wealth being siphoned off without value added by Canadian workers.

And if we notice, our appointed Central Bank Governor is holding inflation to 1.7 percent(March) with Canadian unemployment unchanged at 6.1 percent.

In the U.S. where inflation is allowed to run a little higher at 2.5 percent with a ceiling of 4 percent, unemployment is even lower in that country, around 4.4 percent

[ 07 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
"feed back loop in a tautology." i don't even know what that is.

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TORONTO – Today, a new poll shows that up to three of four Canadians believe that the minimum wage should be at least $10 an hour. According to NDP MP Peggy Nash (Parkdale – High Park), this is just one more indication that the federal government must take the lead when it comes to giving hardworking Canadians a living wage.

Nash currently has a bill before the House of Commons to reinstate a federal minimum wage at $10 an hour.

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
That maybe so however I read that and wrote to one Peggy Nash only to find out there is no such person in the Legislature.

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Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
Affordable housing. The going rate for two bedroom apartments in Toronto is $1000 a month while new construction is at least $2000 a month. That's the cost structure.

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The going rate for a two bedroom apartment in Toronto is $1000 a month?

edited to add that just about all of my clients get the $436 maximum shelter allowance under ODSP. (it's a bit more if you have a kid and need a 2 bedroom.)

[ 10 April 2007: Message edited by: oldgoat ]

Average 2 bedroom apartment: $1067.

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Originally posted by Michelle:

The going rate for a two bedroom apartment in Toronto is $1000 a month?

What alternate universe are you living in?

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CMHC The highest average monthly rents for two-bedroom apartments in new and existing structures were in Toronto ($1,067) and Vancouver ($1,045), followed by ...

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And in a low vacancy market, average is often difficult to find.

I remember looking high and low for decent place to live in mid-90's Ottawa. I went to look at a bachelor pad next to the Queensway coming available. There were ten people living in a tiny apartment up to then, and the apartment complex wanted $850 for it. I ended up way out of town in a rennovated railway building about 200 feet or so from the tracks. I had to learn to sleep through blaring train horns at all hours of the morning. I think a monkey riding a paintshaker might have slept better.

[ 10 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]