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Originally Posted by MrSlippery519
The minimum wage has also made things more difficult for workers that make in the $30-35K range as they rightfully so should expect a "20%" wage increase though I doubt most people in that bracket received a raise of that amount if at all.
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I got a 35% increase and added benefits, but we reduced staffing numbers through attrition. (A few guys left and we simply didn't replace them; just got more efficient equipment and gave their wages to ourselves!) No job losses on a wider scale, everyone who left either had a job lined up already or found one within days, we just reduced staffing. I think over time this will continue until it's a few long-time employees supervising robots but such is the economy these days.
How to reflect the increase among existing employees earning wages in the 12 to 20 per hour range was a difficult topic for many businesses and in some cases still is, I've seen a lot of people on Facebook saying shit like "I'm a mechanic and now I'm only making $20 more than a burger flipper!!" but I always tell them, how you feel about what you're paid is something that only you and your employer can truly sort out.
Most of the better run companies do have room to pay their employees more, it depends on how they built their business. If you've grown by undercutting the competition and running a high-volume low-margin operation for a while then yes, the wage increase stings because you forgot to take into account that costs go up over time. But a business that's taken it into consideration and costed their products at a higher labour rate than they actually paid so that wage increases can be taken into account, or situations like a higher paid employee taking over for a lower paid one to keep the operation going (common among us small business types) is going to have a smaller hurdle to him.
Also, this bill was discussed for over a year, everyone knew it was coming, workers were typically ecstatic about it (especially those on the low end of the pay scale) so no employer has a reasonable excuse for
not being ready for it. My boss started planning for the wage increases back when they were on the old inflation schedule and weren't planning on getting to $15 until the 2020s, but things change with politics, and most people know that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrSlippery519
All this said if the government actually wanted to help the lower class bumping the minimum wage 20% was not the right move to accomplish that. They should have changed the income tax laws so that lower income families paid less tax, move the taxable income amount up to lets say $15,000 (in addition to a smaller minimum wage increase).
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No one suggested that at the time, as far as I can recall. Liberal party members might have brought it up while they discussed the policy but for whatever reason they didn't adopt it, likely because they want to take support from the NDP more than the PCs, which was the strategy when the PCs were led by a moderate in Patrick Brown. The Green Party has supported increasing the basic personal amount to $20,000 and increasing minimum wage to a living wave (can't recall if they wanted it province-wide or based on economic regions but I think the latter?) but they're not in the legislature so they get ignored.
But to get back to your point that the government did this to buy votes: what are the PCs doing when they cut income tax? They're also buying votes.
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Originally Posted by Northern Light
Yes, some products will rise faster in prices, in part because most businesses don't raise their retail price every single year, even though they face inflationary cost pressures.
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To add to your excellent post: adjusting the price of your products isn't as simple as just "this went up by X so price goes up by X". When costing a product, you have to (or at least at my work, we do) take into account everything from the amount of energy used to light the area that makes the product to the heat the warms the cubic feet of the building in which that equipment is located, the percentage of an employee's time spend to make the product, the cost of raw materials going into making the product,
the cost of the time it takes me to research and punch all these numbers into a formula to get an end result, the cost of getting these things to the stores selling them. And the cost of raw materials, especially with a volatile dollar, can fuck with a bottom line a lot more than a minimum wage increase. At the very least, you can see those coming! When you get hit with something like a 6c drop in the value of the loonie vs. the US dollar, or a spike in oil prices a year back causing resin prices to jump making the doohickie you're importing from Iowa cost 17% more than you planned, that's is what really fucks up the costs of products. And when we did it, it was under the (then) assumption that the NDP would win the election and push minimum wage up to $15 and beyond. We've built room into our prices so we can go a while without raising them again. The majority of our customers appreciate that and the ones who don't, they were never all that loyal anyway. 80% of business comes from 20% of your customers (and half of that 80% comes from the top 5%) and we only lost the ones that were a pain in the ass anyway. (I've shared my complaints about big box retail before and will spare you.)
Also, I don't really believe London is a dump. I meant it in terms of "place that isn't glitzy and expensive like Toronto or Vancouver, where the cost of living is lower". Even a $15 minimum wage in Toronto doesn't get you very far there. There are a handful of people in Thunder Bay who have their permanent residence here and fly to Toronto to work a couple times a week because it's preferable to them than living in King City, and I'm not talking about politicians. The "Toronto Refugees" affect the whole province and no, I don't believe minimum wage increases can solve it.
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Even if Costco raised their staff salaries more than that (mine went up $5.50 in October plus an expansion in benefits and the rest of the Liberal's bill which includes more sick days and vacation pay, etc., on top of that and we have yet to raise costs for anything, with no plans to do so in the near future, because our business is well-run and took this increase into account a year ago when the bill was first announced) so there has to be something else at play here. Many of the staples I buy at the grocery store seem to have gone down slightly in price if we want to play the anecdote game, but I shop at Western Canadian stores supplied out of Vancouver, Calgary and Winnipeg, so the Asian-origin products are cheaper here.
But the owner of the business is the employee, which could be part of it?
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