[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by Slava

It's intellectual dishonesty at it's finest. The wages were going to increase and people told them that this will result in job loss. The increase goes through, jobs are lost and now the plan is to say "it shouldn't work that way" or "the small business just doesn't want to eat it" and we're cool with that?

I’d argue it’s no more intellectually dishonest than cherry picking data from one region and using that as the basis for your argument that the increase to the minimum wage was the root cause of the job losses. If that were the case we wouldn’t have seen a overall increase in employment in that industry across the province. It’s about as silly as saying the jobs lost in the finance industry were also a result of the minimum wage increase.

Originally Posted by Zarley

I was just being consistent with the purely economic analysis that you were. You didn't mention anything about other types of utility that may be gained from having more free time. It's certainly possible that some individuals might prefer working fewer hours to earn a similar amount, but in my experience, most hard working people would prefer to work full time hours - especially in an environment where their expenses are continually increasing. There's a reason these people are categorized as involuntary part-time.

Less work for the same pay plays a roll in the overall economics. I didn’t think that needed clarification.

Also, the previous policy linked minimum wage increases with CPI, so nobody was 'falling behind,' real wages were simply constant.

If that were the case the minimum wage would have increased every single year, you know, with inflation. That hadn’t been the case. Interestingly enough even under the old system every time increasing the minimum was brought up we would still always hear the same arguments that it would hurt businesses.

Great, well let's work through a real world example from this Herald article:


So pre-minimum wage increase, let's assume we have a hostess making $10.20/hr, three waiters at $9.20hr plus an additional $9.20 in tips, and a manager making $25/hr. That equates to total aggregate earnings of $2,104 for all employees over a 40 hour week.

Today we only have two servers making $13.60/hr, and let's assume the amount of tips stays the same but is split in two rather than three, so $13.80/hr in tips. Adding in the manager, we are still at $2,104 in gross weekly earnings.

I think your math is a little off here. If 3 servers were each making $9.20/hour in tips and the total amount of tips coming in remained the same and were split 2 ways instead of 3 if one server left, then the two remaining servers would be making $13.80 in tips alone. Add their minimum wage to that and they would be earning $27.40/hour or $1096/week. The total earnings for both employees combined would be $2192(not including the manager)

We now have two people who are clearly better off and two others that are no longer working.

If you want to assume the 2 former employees couldn’t find other jobs.

The amount of take home pay has remained the exact same.

That’s clearly not the case. Even using your example.

All we've done is shift things around - is this a better scenario? The bottom line is the fact that a minimum wage increase does not magically increase the amount of pay available to workers, only capital investment and economic growth can do that.

I don’t remember ever arguing that it changed the amount of pay available for workers. Oddly enough(according to the article you posted) it is somehow magically increasing the available pay to employees who’s employers are now giving their employees raises to keep them above minimum wage.