New Minimum Wage Hike Goes into Effect Today
Prince George, B.C. – Those at the bottom of the pay scale in this province will receive a small boost on their next pay checks.
This as the minimum wage increases from $10.45 an hour to $10.85 an hour starting today. The liquor server minimum wage will also rise 40 cents to $9.60.
The provincial government says these new rates include the 10 cents scheduled for the 2015 Consumer Price Index (CPI), plus an additional 30 cents.
There will also be a second increase of 30 cents an hour plus an amount based on the 2016 CPI on September 15, 2017 bringing the general minimum wage to at least $11.25 and the liquor serving minimum wage to $10.
The 2016 CPI will be available from Statistics Canada by March 2017.
Despite the bump, the BC NDP argues the increases don’t go far enough and have promised to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by the end of their first term in government if elected next May.
Comments
This should be supply and demand driven. Not government issued
I so agree with the wage hike to 15.00 not everyone had the opportunity to live with mom and dad or have the government hand outs the first nations people get to better their skill sets..
Most of the jobs paying minimum wage are the huge companies that pay minimum taxes and can afford the hikes..and before you all jump on me for the first nation comments I am just quoting what I hear on the radio watch on TV and read in the paper….I never hear or read anything about the underprivileged or poor being given these opportunities
The reality is that a large percentage of these entry level minimum wage jobs are supplied by the small business sector. A lot of them operate on very narrow margins, and labour is already their highest cost!
When you start increasing minimum wage by as much as 50% what do you think happens? Does the owner go shake some extra money off the money tree out back??
He/She has to find that extra money by increasing prices for goods or services supplied, take the increase in wages out of another part of the budget or reduce the workforce so that the total dollars spent on wages remain level!
In today’s competitive market place a significant increase in prices is not going to be viable, and there is usually not enough meat on the bone to allow significant cuts in other expense areas so most small business owners will do the math and figure out that where they had 3 employees at $10 per hour they can only afford 2 employees at $15 per hour.
Pretty simple math really. works out great for the 2 still working, but not so great for the one the gets laid off!
Sure NyteHawwk, but it is hard to reconcile your point of view with reality.
.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rbc-replaces-canadian-staff-with-foreign-workers-1.1315008
Poor, poor, Royal Bank of Canada how can they manage to survive without minimum wage earning cheap temporary foreign workers?
“Royal Bank of Canada reports that its 2015 profit was $10.03 billion, an 11 per cent increase from last year. That included $2.59 billion in the fourth quarter ended Oct. 31, which was also up 11 per cent.”
.cbc.ca/news/business/royal-bank-2015-profit-1.3346602
Jgalt, not many people employed at RBC or any of the BIG banks are paid minimum wage. In fact most entry level positions start in the neighbourhood of twice that.
And perhaps be a little more selective in the stories that you post links to. That one goes back to 2013, and is not even related to the minimum wage debate in BC.
I’ll state right here that I’m not in favor of any Canadian being displaced from a job so that a lower cost foreign worker can be brought in however at the same time corporate profits should not be a dirty word. If not for profits there would be NO jobs!
As I stated earlier the great majority of minimum wage entry level positions are in the small business sector and they are the ones that are going to be the most severely impacted by a 50% increase in their wage costs
NyteHawwk states; “…however at the same time corporate profits should not be a dirty word. If not for profits there would be NO jobs!”
Corporate profits would not be such a dirty word, if these corporations actually paid taxes on those profits. Off-shore tax havens, good for them, bad for us!
.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-corporate-tax-haven-1.3554910
I apologize for cross posting this link, but it is so very relevant for splashing reality on your pro-corporate right wing ideology.
And this has to do with minimum wage being raised in BC… how?
just remember, you hike up min wage everything else goes up too. watch those gas prices and food go up a bit. just sayin, not always a great thing.
One hopes that worker productivity increases to create the value for the employers, but on the other side the big winner is the community as a whole.
Lower income workers generally spend their dollars locally, every dollar spend locally generates another dollar of local revenue. If the revenue however goes to corporate profits and then its often off shored and never seen again.
If local spending lower income workers have more disposable income than this benefits small service based businesses in the longer run once they adjust for worker productivity in their own operations. Especially when these local spenders continue to revolve those same dollars multiple times in the community for multiple needed local services.
On the other hand when the wealthy get a raise it tends to leave to local community right away for things like travel, a car, savings investment portfolio’s, and off shore shareholders. This contributes nothing to the local economy if the money is only once earned in the community than gone.
, savings investment portfolio’s, and off shore shareholders. Wrong eagle . The money earned as dividends and or capital gains when repatriated contributes even more to local economies and taxes all along the food chain than if it were to be earned and spent only the once . Money is more than just a currency . It’s a tool .
And the min wage earners tool box is empty.
Jgalt, do you spend your entire life going in circles!
What you keep posting has diddley to do with the Minimum wage argument!
It seems that every story leads to you ranting about RIGHT WING IDEOLOGY!
This is simple economics at play, its not big corp vs little guy or huge offshore profits vs increasing wages.
Reality is that for every Royal Bank there are 1000 small to medium sized businesses that employ millions of people. It is those businesses and their employees that are going to be impacted. The big corporations do not care about minimum wage as they are not really impacted by it!
If minimum wage is increased to $15 dollars per hour (labour costs increase) across the board, how is small business disadvantaged? If “all” small businesses are required to raise their wages, where is the competitive advantage?
And don’t use the higher costs of production not being competitive with other cheap labour countries, false flag, because we are talking about small business here.
Just to preemptively respond to your predictable but, but, raising minimum wages will increase prices to us the consumer:
.washington.edu/news/2016/04/18/early-analysis-of-seattles-15-wage-law-effect-on-prices-minimal-one-year-after-implementation/
Some like to point to Seattle and it’s $15.00 per hour Minimum Wage Ordinance, but what they fail to mention is that Seattle DOES NOT currently have a %15.00 per hour minimum wage!
Saying that the minimum wage in Seattle is $15.00 per hour is a FLAT OUT BALD FACED LIE!!
The Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance calls for the increase to take place over SEVERAL years based on a scale that considers the size of and benefits offered by an employer. It will apply first to many large businesses in 2017 and then to all businesses by 2021!
But, saying that Seattle has a $15.00 per hour minimum wage sounds better, right? But that would be a LIE!
SeaTac, a suburb of Seattle, hiked the minimum wage for certain service industry employees to $15 at the beginning of the year, in 2014, and there are already signs that the sudden increase is having a negative impact. This according to an article from May 29, 2014.
“Surprise! Leftist minimum wage policy backfires in Seattle suburb”
“A February report from the Seattle Times revealed:
At the Clarion Hotel off International Boulevard, a sit-down restaurant has been shuttered, though it might soon be replaced by a less-labor-intensive cafe…
Other businesses have adjusted in ways that run the gamut from putting more work in the hands of managers, to instituting a small “living-wage surcharge” for a daily parking space near the airport.”
ht tp://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/17751-warning-to-seattle-seatac-businesses-slashing-benefits-overtime-in-wake-of-wage-hike
Jgalt, this is like trying to solve a circular argument!
It does not seem to compute on your end.
Quite simply those increased wages have to come from somewhere. If the business does not have the ability to raise prices to accommodate the increased labour costs, then the business has to get labour costs back in line. There is only one real way to do that short of your employees suddenly becoming 50% more productive, and that is to reduce the number of employees to the point where labour costs are close to the same level as before the wage increase.
Simple math, and simple economics!
Not a circular argument at all, those increases in minimum wages have to come from somewhere, like from the company’s profits… hey better to distribute it to the workers who helped the business make those profits, than have those profits transferred into an off-shore tax haven. No?
I like how I tied the two subject togeather yet again.
I think return on investment for business / company owners should be set at a specific rate, this would also keep something like this from happening: Martin Shkreli’s Turing Pharmaceuticals bought a drug and then increased its price 5,000%. More recently, the price of an EpiPen has skyrocketed more than 500% since 2009.
No doubt about it, “greed” cannot regulate itself, time for government to step in and makes business provide a bigger share its profits, through wages, for their workers. We also need government to close all those damn off-shore tax loopholes… all this corporate and business greed is going to bankrupt us!
As my 20 something daughter says….OMFG!
What colour is the sky in your world??
I have no idea what utopia you are dreaming of but last i checked we live in a democratic society, not a communist or even a socialist one.
You keep using these US references, and big corporation refernces, that again have ZERO relation to the subject at hand….and yes you keep going in circles like the dog chasing his tail.
Once again we are referring to the majority of businesses in BC, which are in fact small to medium sized, they are not making huge corporate profits and they are certainly not stashing them offshore.
In my small business, if Government or some nutjob bureaucrat were to start telling me how to distribute my hard earned profits it would be time to close my doors and put my 5 employees out of work! So much for your Utopian society!
I agree. For some small business folk, this would perhaps close the door, as they’re trying to make end meet. As they profit, so do the employees with wage increases. For now, this is a good thing. I would like nothing better than seeing the wage increase to $15. per hour, but honest employers (and a lot of small business are damn good employers) will pass on the profits.
For a full decade BC froze its minimum wage at $8.00 per hour, at the time an additional student / youth of $6.00 per hour was also implemented. Yup small business operated in privileged low labour cost conditions for many years… and you know what? Those low wages made absolutely no difference towards increasing employment and job creation!
“It appears the Liberal regime’s new reduced $6 an hour minimum wage is not having the promised effects of lowering youth unemployment and helping small business after all, according to recent indicators.
According to Statistics Canada, unemployment in BC has crept up to almost ten per cent, well above the 7.5 per cent national average, and the province is lagging behind the rest of the country in job creation.”
.columbiajournal.ca/02-09/SixDollarWageFailure.html
The facts and history do not support your assertions NyteHawwk, you can run around on here all day screaming “the sky is falling” when it come to the effects of increasing minimum wages on small business, but until you come up with credible sources to support those assertions, you are just fear mongering.
JGalt, you criticise NyteHawk for trying, as others have tried previously, to educate you on the basics of a subject in which your ignorance is certainly not ‘bliss’.
You yap about how the minimum wage needs to be $ 15, and that making it so won’t mean the “sky is falling” for businesses.
But then in other places you wail about the increase in child poverty, and how the number of homeless are growing, and how many more now must depend on the Food Bank to live.
ALL these increases INCREASED as the minimum wage went UP, JGalt. And raising it to the cherished $ 15, just like that, right now, would swell their numbers even further.
You seem incapable of understanding that what MUST increase to make everyone better off is NOT the minimum, or any other wage, per se, but the PURCHASING POWER of each dollar any income is made up of. Big difference. All you’re going to accomplish by increasing the minimum wage is a further DECREASE in that purchasing power. Wages, in the ultimate sense, are simply an issue of credit to the wage earner. The alter ego to credit issue is price making. For what is issued in money as ‘costs’ HAS TO BE taken back in ‘prices’. And it will be. If you truly wanted to ELIMINATE poverty , instead of as the NDP actually does, just ‘represent’ it, you’d take a long hard look at the way the same type of accounting that’s used in every business could, and should, be applied to the economy as a whole. That’s where the answer is, JGalt. Not in inanely attacking ‘profit’, especially when you don’t even understand what profit really is.
Awww… socredible is having a conniption fit. Tell you what, lets just do away with minimum wage altogether… and replace it with guaranteed annual income?
Deep breaths socredible.
Keep it up, JGalt. You’re the best advertisement for re-electing the BC Liberals they could ever ask for!
Tell me something, JGalt. Why is virtually every left-winger so utterly ignorant of basic business accounting? Is it because none of you have ever had the desire to try to provide goods and services to others on your own initiative? That you can only work ‘under control’? Must be.
You rail against ‘profit’, but do you know if there was no profit no business that borrows from a bank could ever repay its loans? And ultimately, JGalt, if you trace it back far enough, virtually all of the ‘money’ that’s in existence is ON LOAN to us.
There are a few exceptions. What the RBC and other big banks SPEND into the economy, to pay wages and salaries, and for all their other expenses, including anything they might pay you on your savings, is one of them. But that’s miniscule compared to the volume of credit they create to enable business to operate and the overall economy to function.
No profit, no repayment. No repayment, no more lending. No more lending, business closes, and economy is in the tank.
Welp, I had to read through you comment a couple of times socredible, and this is what I got out of it.
.youtube.com/watch?v=ss2hULhXf04
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