Dr. Ed Doherty gives tough medicine to N.B. working poor, pretends it's candy.
Submitted by D Brown on Thu, 2006-12-07 19:46.
By Dana R. Brown
The news article appearing in last Saturday’s Daily Gleaner issue, 2 December 2006, entitled “Minimum wage to reach $7.25 next year” left me angry but not surprised. This article reported that Post- Secondary Education, Training and Labour Minister, Ed Doherty, announced a minimum wage increase to $7.00 per hour on 1 January 2007, and another increase on 1 July 2007, to $7.25 per hour. Ed Doherty stated that “it will make a huge difference in the lives of the many people living on minimum wage” and that this will provide as an “opportunity” to improve living standards. The Liberal party of New Brunswick is apparently very excited by these changes as it is part of their plan to make N. B. “self sufficient” by 2025. Doherty also stated that businesses appreciate the Liberal government taking recommendations from the Minimum Wage board, rather than making a “political decision”.
That last statement is a very telling one, as it signifies who the Liberal party takes their orders from, business owners and investors, not you and I, the working people of New Brunswick. As for making a “huge difference” and improving living standards, these negligible increases will do nothing to help the working poor.
Don’t believe me? Take into account the fact that the Liberals have recently given a Christmas gift to their rich friends in the form of an increased tax credit on dividends from 3.7% to 12%. That’s quite a generous gift for people already rich enough to not need handouts. Insurance corporations are another example. They profit off of working New Brunswickers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, all the while price gouging us, discriminating against us based on sex, age, and where we choose to live. What do the Liberals do? Well, Justice Minister T. J. Burke and the Liberal party, after campaigning on the principle of public auto insurance, have chosen instead to cut a deal with insurance companies. That’s right, the Liberals are allowing big insurance corporations to continue to exploit New Brunswickers. It’s just another early Christmas present for the wealthy friends of the Liberal party. You can just feel the Christmas cheer in the air! Unfortunately for many New Brunswickers there’s no extra income to enjoy Christmas the same way the Liberals and their cronies will.
Just who are the working poor and what are there jobs like anyway? They work one or several jobs, full time hours, for minimum wage or just above minimum wage. Their jobs rarely have collective bargaining protections, are subjected to harsh management techniques, and have little or no benefits. Two thirds of the people in these low paid positions are women. Often these workers are single mothers struggling to make a decent living for their children. The working poor are also young students trying to pay their bills, while paying the second highest tuition rates in the country. A growing proportion of working poor are over 55, forced to work a crappy job because their pensions aren’t adequate enough. Many New Brunswickers in this situation are stuck here, unable to pull themselves out of poverty. They deserve better!
Dr. Doherty knows, as I know, that he failed to tell New Brunswickers what Statistics Canada has known for years about minimum wage in New Brunswick. That is, Atlantic Canada has the lowest wages in the country, we have the lowest minimum wages, and more people in Atlantic Canada are working poor. Take New Brunswick for instance, if matched with rising inflation, minimum wage would have been $9.00 per hour in the year 2000. According to Statistics Canada, for a single person to remain above the poverty line they have to earn a minimum of $10.00 per hour, 40 hours a week, full time, for a year. For a family of four, the subsistence wage is approximately $15 per hour. As of the year 2000, Statistics Canada reports that half of all wage earners in New Brunswick make something between minimum wage and 12 dollars an hour. That’s testament to the fact that a low minimum wage sets a low benchmark and acts as a dead weight, dragging other wage levels down with it. It’s plain fact that a $7.25 an hour minimum wage will do very little to help those that need help the most. That’s why if you read Ed Doherty’s quote carefully, he said that the minimum wage increase will provide an “opportunity” for one to increase their living standards. That's pretty sneaky Ed.
The working people of this province need to demand reforms and social programs so that we can improve our lives. It’s easy to get discouraged thinking about how the rich always keep getting richer and the poor always keep getting poorer, but regular people in other countries are fighting back against regressive policies. New Brunswickers can do the same! We can start by demanding the provincial government deliver a public pharamacare program for prescription drugs, public auto insurance, public daycare programs, and a cap on tuition coupled with grants for low-income students, and that’s just for starters. We’re entitled to ask for even more. How about a real job creation strategy? Like a concrete, long-term investment in the manufacturing sector that will provide well paying jobs. However, I think these things might be too progressive for the Liberals. At the very minimum we need to demand a living wage for all those that work.
That last statement is a very telling one, as it signifies who the Liberal party takes their orders from, business owners and investors, not you and I, the working people of New Brunswick. As for making a “huge difference” and improving living standards, these negligible increases will do nothing to help the working poor.
Don’t believe me? Take into account the fact that the Liberals have recently given a Christmas gift to their rich friends in the form of an increased tax credit on dividends from 3.7% to 12%. That’s quite a generous gift for people already rich enough to not need handouts. Insurance corporations are another example. They profit off of working New Brunswickers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, all the while price gouging us, discriminating against us based on sex, age, and where we choose to live. What do the Liberals do? Well, Justice Minister T. J. Burke and the Liberal party, after campaigning on the principle of public auto insurance, have chosen instead to cut a deal with insurance companies. That’s right, the Liberals are allowing big insurance corporations to continue to exploit New Brunswickers. It’s just another early Christmas present for the wealthy friends of the Liberal party. You can just feel the Christmas cheer in the air! Unfortunately for many New Brunswickers there’s no extra income to enjoy Christmas the same way the Liberals and their cronies will.
Just who are the working poor and what are there jobs like anyway? They work one or several jobs, full time hours, for minimum wage or just above minimum wage. Their jobs rarely have collective bargaining protections, are subjected to harsh management techniques, and have little or no benefits. Two thirds of the people in these low paid positions are women. Often these workers are single mothers struggling to make a decent living for their children. The working poor are also young students trying to pay their bills, while paying the second highest tuition rates in the country. A growing proportion of working poor are over 55, forced to work a crappy job because their pensions aren’t adequate enough. Many New Brunswickers in this situation are stuck here, unable to pull themselves out of poverty. They deserve better!
Dr. Doherty knows, as I know, that he failed to tell New Brunswickers what Statistics Canada has known for years about minimum wage in New Brunswick. That is, Atlantic Canada has the lowest wages in the country, we have the lowest minimum wages, and more people in Atlantic Canada are working poor. Take New Brunswick for instance, if matched with rising inflation, minimum wage would have been $9.00 per hour in the year 2000. According to Statistics Canada, for a single person to remain above the poverty line they have to earn a minimum of $10.00 per hour, 40 hours a week, full time, for a year. For a family of four, the subsistence wage is approximately $15 per hour. As of the year 2000, Statistics Canada reports that half of all wage earners in New Brunswick make something between minimum wage and 12 dollars an hour. That’s testament to the fact that a low minimum wage sets a low benchmark and acts as a dead weight, dragging other wage levels down with it. It’s plain fact that a $7.25 an hour minimum wage will do very little to help those that need help the most. That’s why if you read Ed Doherty’s quote carefully, he said that the minimum wage increase will provide an “opportunity” for one to increase their living standards. That's pretty sneaky Ed.
The working people of this province need to demand reforms and social programs so that we can improve our lives. It’s easy to get discouraged thinking about how the rich always keep getting richer and the poor always keep getting poorer, but regular people in other countries are fighting back against regressive policies. New Brunswickers can do the same! We can start by demanding the provincial government deliver a public pharamacare program for prescription drugs, public auto insurance, public daycare programs, and a cap on tuition coupled with grants for low-income students, and that’s just for starters. We’re entitled to ask for even more. How about a real job creation strategy? Like a concrete, long-term investment in the manufacturing sector that will provide well paying jobs. However, I think these things might be too progressive for the Liberals. At the very minimum we need to demand a living wage for all those that work.
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min. wage
These parliamentary cretins. How about they SuperSize my pay, instead of SuperSizing corporate profits! Neoliberalism has done nothing for the people except replace fairly decent jobs with low-paying MacJobs. People deserve better.
Raise the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour, fixed to inflation! That would be a start. Canadians need a federally legislated minimum wage.
The next step would be to raise it to something like $12, or 2/3 the average wage.
Eventually, and the sooner the better, we will need a socialist government. Human beings can never be free until democratic control is extended into the economic realm. Until then, freedom and demoracy must remain a sham, mere empty words. Such a government should reduce the working week to 35 hours, then to 32. Productivity doubles about every thirty years, but workers in North America have not seen a corresponding increase in leisure time. In fact, we have been working harder in recent years.
Naturally, it will be argued (not in this language) that capitalists need to extract surplus from workers, so that they can maintain profits, and 'remain competitive'. I say, make social justice for the working masses a priority, and let private business manage the best it can. If this does not suit them, perhaps the people can run production more effectively.
If the government really wants NB to be self-sufficient by 2025, hand the factories over to the people. Let communities manage their forests, farmlands, and the fish in the sea. Let us produce energy, housing and food to meet our needs and desires, and trade the surplus. Let all profits, rent from land, and interest on finances return to the people via publicly owned and managed institutions.
A wage can never be truly fair, since wage-labour is simply the mask that exploitation wears in our economy. Social justice ultimately lies in nothing less than the social ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.