[Zarley]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

I find it interesting that you classify an employee earning the same pay for less hours of work as “irrelevant” or having “no gain”.

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.

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

If server hours are cut, meaning there are less servers on every shift, but the number of customers remains the same would you consider it be unreasonable to assume that individual tips/hour worked would actually increase for the staff?

Likely to some extent, but there is a maximum amount of tables one can serve before the quality of service declines. With the decrease in discretionary consumer spending we've seen, the number of customers has certainly declined so it's probably a wash overall.

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

That [inflation] is happening regardless of whether or not the minimum wage is increased, so if you earn minimum wage and it isn’t being increased, you’re already falling behind.

While it's true that inflation is expected in an expansionary economic environment and is often treated as a constant in financial modelling, the rate of inflation is dependent on a many micro factors, one of which is the cost of labour. When you increase minimum wage beyond the rate of inflation as we've seen, it affects consumer pricing in sectors heavily reliant on unskilled labour. Over the past few years in Alberta, we've seen inflation levels higher than what would be expected in a recessionary environment based on historical precedent. If you examine CPI numbers in detail, you can see fairly high inflation figures in the retail and consumer goods and restaurant food segments when compared with other jurisdictions and the national average. This undue inflation works to erode a portion of the gains that minimum wage earners might accrue from the recent increase.

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

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

I can’t wait

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

A hostess, three servers and a manager would usually be on hand to serve that many people, but on Monday, the restaurant was down to two servers and a manager.

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.

We now have two people who are clearly better off and two others that are no longer working. The amount of take home pay has remained the exact same. 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.