Only the rich oppose $15 hr min wage

[ferri]

*back on topic please! thanks.

[rustled]

The idea that one is entitled to be able to afford independant living with all the trimmings on what is meant to be an entry level job misses the point.

I didn't say anything about independent living. All I said was "a home". A home can be with 2 roommates but it's still your place to come back to at the end of the day.

Someone working a full-time minimum wage job who still can't afford to rent a home with 2 roommates needs help managing their money. That would go much further for them than legislating a bump in pay that simultaneously drives up the cost of everything they pay for. It would be a temporary stop-gap measure at best, and does nothing to address your concern.

Raising the minimum wage to accommodate those who have difficulty managing their budgets is not an appropriate way to address homelessness.

[TreeGuy]

Someone working a full-time minimum wage job who still can't afford to rent a home with 2 roommates needs help managing their money. That would go much further for them than legislating a bump in pay that simultaneously drives up the cost of everything they pay for. It would be a temporary stop-gap measure at best, and does nothing to address your concern.

Raising the minimum wage to accommodate those who have difficulty managing their budgets is not an appropriate way to address homelessness.

Excellent comment, my thoughts exactly!

Why aren't we teaching money management in grade school??? Could you imagine the impact of our economy if more people new how to budget their money!

If anyone is interested, check out a program called YNAB. Mrs. Treeguy and I use it to manage our personal finances.

[rustled]

It's called doing what you know how to do and not necessarily thinking that the end would ever come. We all know folks that fell into that trap.

I was in retail for several years and quite honestly could have kept that up for many more. I was making OK money, had a decent rental situation that literally may not have ever changed if I had continued to pay the rent and was comfortable.

Stuff changed including my ambitions but lots of the folks I worked with stuck it out and suffered when the LARGE company we all worked for simply disappeared. They weren't too dumb for anything but they were certainly challenged to find another path.

For some, that happened when they were in their fiftys and beyond. They had a path and they were happy with it and they didn't see the end but it came anyhow. Doesn't make the stupid.

And if all the ditch diggers decided that they wanted to pursue a different course, would you pick up a shovel?

Many of us have experienced serious financial setbacks, life-altering situations often involving our careers. While it may seem ideal to try to set the minimum wage so no one has to experience the genuine hardship that comes with such tough times, it really doesn't address that issue, either. If the minimum wage is jacked up to cover such a scenario, it devalues everyone's income, and the raise you've given the person on tough times is devalued more than most. That's if they're still able to find work at all.

One poster keeps suggesting that it is up to employers to ensure everyone has a liveable wage and if they can't do that, they shouldn't be employers.

Follow that to its logical conclusion. The employer stops providing the service or product, eliminating employment opportunities for many people who are currently grateful to have an opportunity to contribute, earn something and improve their lot in life (including teens, people with mental disabilities, college students, people returning to the workforce and, yes, those temporarily forced into doing whatever they can while they get through a tough change.)

Or the employers provide that service or product by charging enough more to cover their suddenly increased labour costs. (We're not talking about the normal, planned, tied-to-inflation raise in the minimum wage, but a jump from minimal to liveable.) And many employers must now raise their non-minimum wage package to maintain an appropriate gap between employees with more ability and experience, and those with none. In some cases, perhaps most, this means charging a great deal more for their products and services.

So if everyone's costs have gone up, and many others' wages have gone up, too, how well-off is the person on minimum wage now? How likely is it that their wage is still liveable? If it's not, are we going to jack up the minimum again?

What good has any of this done for anyone?

Is it so wrong to have a minimum wage that actually reflects minimal experience and minimal ability, for jobs requiring minimal experience and minimal ability? Is it so wrong to allow some employers to provide people with an opportunity to contribute, earn and learn at a wage that reflects this, while they're on their way to something better paid?

And really, why is it up to employers to address and manage social policy?

[rustled]

...

Why aren't we teaching money management in grade school??? Could you imagine the impact of our economy if more people new how to budget their money!

If anyone is interested, check out a program called YNAB. Mrs. Treeguy and I use it to manage our personal finances.

It helps, but it doesn't all sink in at that age. (My kids had "oh, yeah..." moments years later when they realized they'd goofed themselves into a financial hole of some sort.)

Lots of colleges and community organizations offer money management sessions, many of them free. I'd like to see more of them, but we can't force people to attend.

Instead, there's a movement to force employers to pay more, but that is so counterproductive.

[The Green Barbarian]

Why aren't we teaching money management in grade school??? Could you imagine the impact of our economy if more people new how to budget their money .

Nice thought but do you honestly think that the fine young communists/social justice warriors being turned out by our taxpayer funded institutions of higher learning have any clue how to coach our young skulls full of mush on money management? They have no clue how to manage their own money let alone teach anyone else on the subject. All these new "teachers" know is how to give more and more of their paycheque to their diseased union. Any sort of introduction of money management concepts would just be rejected as some sort of capitalist plot by our current shallow thinking squishy and brain dead leftist teaching establishment. And as we all know, math is hard.

[JLives]

Why aren't we teaching money management in grade school??? Could you imagine the impact of our economy if more people new how to budget their money!

We should be doing a better job in this area. When I was in high school I was a representative to our school district and that was one of my recommendations for the CAPP program. Practical skills are not adequately taught in our school system.

[rustled]

We should be doing a better job in this area. When I was in high school I was a representative to our school district and that was one of my recommendations for the CAPP program. Practical skills are not adequately taught in our school system.

I agree, to a point. It's not enough to teach it in grade school. Too much of it is "just theory" for them at that age, especially if they're not yet earning a wage to make decisions around. Like much of what we learn in life, practical application reinforces the message.

My kids all learned about debt financing in school, either under the old system and or under the CAPP system, and (I thought!) around our dinner table. But each of them ended up having to relearn some of it the hard way, out in the real world.

[davis123]

Why did these 50+ people go through life without picking up any skills/trade/education along the way? Was digging ditches their plan till their retire? Nobody told them they have to grow up? And now they're too dumb to use a computer?

And now they want guaranteed income and government holding their hand because they can't adult. And of course everyone else has to pay for it.

Who cares why they made the choices they did? It is what it is.

It is a fact of life that not everybody has education or employable skills. It's just that simple. To go on and judge them or make remarks like you did, doesn't change the outcome and doesn't change the fact that there will ALWAYS be people in this situation. Yes of course we all pay for it through our taxes, a guaranteed income is no different than welfare, EI, CPP, WCB, Child tax, etc. This is part of what our taxes pay for, to take care of the people who are not able to pay for themselves. It is easier to accept this will never change than to place judgements on them, because you don't know any of the reasoning behind anyone's life, so self-righteousness is not needed.

[The Green Barbarian]

Raising the minimum wage to accommodate those who have difficulty managing their budgets is not an appropriate way to address homelessness.

and yet its all part of "leftist" philosophy. Running a giant budget deficit? No problem. Just raise taxes! You still have no money in your pocket even though you make lots of money? No problem. Just force everyone to raise wages! That's the solution to everything. Raise taxes, raise salaries. Never look at the other side of the equation, the over-spending. Because that's way too hard. You might have to give up something, or tell someone that their funding is cut, and that's hard. Life is supposed to be easy. Always.

[hobbyguy]

The lack of compassion and understanding for fellow Canadians shown in some of these posts is disturbing to me.

That aside, minimum wage increases do NOT kill jobs. They do NOT kill small businesses. They do NOT kill medium size businesses. See my previous post from the US dept. of labor.

IF small business A has to raise wages for their employees, so does their competitor B, and C and so on. Therefore it has zero impact on their competitive position.

And depending on the business, there can be compensatory factors. Here is one: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/pay-workers-more-so-they-steal-less

Another compensating factor is that generally, if the wage offered will meet a prospective employee's basic needs, then you will have a somewhat wider range of candidates to choose from. That can translate into lowered training costs and better outcomes in terms of productivity and employee turnover.

[LTD]

see heres where the problem arises as an owner of a small business I'm going to pass on those extra costs as is everyone else and I'm getting a little bit tired of being taxed more and more and paying more and more while my income is becoming less and less. So now people think they deserve a higher minimum wage because they cant get by yet buying a pack of smokes a day or stopping at timmies isn't a problem, I have an employee who is paid more than 15 bucks an hour and eats fast food almost everyday and is always broke, the wage isn't the problem peoples money skills are the problem.

[hobbyguy]

There will always be folks that that have poor personal management skills. That is just a convenient circular argument.

I have had employees that got paid $28/hr and more who had zero clue when it comes to managing their own money. That is largely not within the scope of employer concern. I didn't give a rats if the employee wanted to blow large wads of cash on snowmobiles and big tires for his truck etc. I did care if the employee gave us a solid 8 hrs work for 8 hrs pay and did good work.

The question is what would the net impact be on small business, and the answer is that in the long run zero. Run your small business well, and as the competitive level rises with the wages... you win!

[rustled]

The lack of compassion and understanding for fellow Canadians shown in some of these posts is disturbing to me.

That aside, minimum wage increases do NOT kill jobs. They do NOT kill small businesses. They do NOT kill medium size businesses. See my previous post from the US dept. of labor.

IF small business A has to raise wages for their employees, so does their competitor B, and C and so on. Therefore it has zero impact on their competitive position.

And depending on the business, there can be compensatory factors. Here is one: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/pay-workers-more-so-they-steal-less

Another compensating factor is that generally, if the wage offered will meet a prospective employee's basic needs, then you will have a somewhat wider range of candidates to choose from. That can translate into lowered training costs and better outcomes in terms of productivity and employee turnover.

Please don't confuse the issue. As pointed out when you previously quoted the US dept of labor, this thread is about a sudden, substantial jump in the minimum wage to make it a liveable wage, well over and above the scheduled, expected increases tied to inflation for which all sensible employers already plan.

I doubt many people object to regularly raising the minimum wage. That's not what's being talked about here.

And I can assure you, the lack of compassion and understanding some posters are showing for the people who will very definitely lose their jobs if employers are forced to pay all employees a liveable wage is very disturbing to those of us who will have to help them transition back to full-time welfare when they're let go.

[hobbyguy]

That job loss notion is simply a myth.