In what is more or less a paean to the marvels of unbridled immigration, David Parkinson has a multi-page feature in the Globe and Mail today about the economic boom in PEI. The caption to one of the pictures tells us that "...Royal Star Foods has increasingly been forced to rely on temporary foreign workers..."
We know that scenario intimately. Employers are "forced" to hire foreign workers because they offer shit jobs for shit wages, end of story. Pay a decent wage and your labour shortage will disappear, you greedy bastards.
Just to confirm my suspicions, I took a quick trip to Tignish on the Canada Job Bank. Sure enough, Royal Star Foods has a job listing still posted from last October looking for 50 workers for their lobster processing plant. The pay? $12.50 an hour.
That's a full $1.25 an hour above the PEI minimum wage. So maybe they're not the greediest greedbags in the biz, but still... what kind of a life can you live on $12.50 an hour?
Fired up the googlator to do some investigating. The single most debilitating expense for low income workers anywhere in Canada is the cost of housing. The average cost of a single family home nationwide hovers around the half-million mark. How does Seacow Pond stack up?
If you're used to Toronto prices you're in for a shock. Check out this two-bedroom charmer in downtown Tignish with a $34,700 asking price. That's the full price of the house and lot - not the amount of the deposit cheque or the down payment.
In case you don't have the headroom on your Mastercard to buy the place outright, I ran the numbers through the TD mortgage calculator. TD tells me that a $30,000 mortgage at their three year fixed rate of 3.34% is going to run me $152.36.
Per month!
The lobster gig runs roughly April to December. That's more than enough to accumulate the 910 hours of work to qualify for EI for the other three or four months. A typical fisheries worker can easily make $30k/yr. The big banks don't want you spending more than 30% of your annual gross on mortgage and taxes. Looks to me like virtually anybody working, including at minimum wage, can afford to buy their own place in this corner of PEI.
Go east, young man!
Showing posts with label minimum wage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label minimum wage. Show all posts
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Friday, October 20, 2017
Billionaires have too much money
Money is power, they say.
Well, money isn't power when somebody with a gun takes the money away from you.
This may explain why the USA leads the world in both the number of billionaires and the number of guns.
America's guns do not threaten those billionaires, though.
America's guns, at every level, defend those billionaires.
I'm not sure why it's considered desirable to have such a thing as billionaires in society, but for whatever reason, that's where we're at. Look at the Trump cabinet.
If you're an American working at the minimum wage, you can work from age fourteen until you die and all your piddly paychecks added together won't amount to a million dollars.
A billion means a thousand times a million. Your top hedge fund guys are embarrassed if they don't up their net worth by at least a billion a year.
Being a billionaire means never having to say you're sorry. And why would you? You're obviously worth at least a thousand times more than whatever your most well-heeled critics are worth.
Being a billionaire means you can do whatever the fuck you want with no consequences. Read up on Jeff Epstein if you don't believe me.
But...
But the times may be a-changing.
Sir Richard Branson's name is seeping into the scandal unleashed by the Weinstein affair.
What?
Rich men take advantage of vulnerable women?
Who knew?
Wasn't that Obama cavorting on Branson's yacht after his exit from the White House?
He obviously had no idea either...
Well, money isn't power when somebody with a gun takes the money away from you.
This may explain why the USA leads the world in both the number of billionaires and the number of guns.
America's guns do not threaten those billionaires, though.
America's guns, at every level, defend those billionaires.
I'm not sure why it's considered desirable to have such a thing as billionaires in society, but for whatever reason, that's where we're at. Look at the Trump cabinet.
If you're an American working at the minimum wage, you can work from age fourteen until you die and all your piddly paychecks added together won't amount to a million dollars.
A billion means a thousand times a million. Your top hedge fund guys are embarrassed if they don't up their net worth by at least a billion a year.
Being a billionaire means never having to say you're sorry. And why would you? You're obviously worth at least a thousand times more than whatever your most well-heeled critics are worth.
Being a billionaire means you can do whatever the fuck you want with no consequences. Read up on Jeff Epstein if you don't believe me.
But...
But the times may be a-changing.
Sir Richard Branson's name is seeping into the scandal unleashed by the Weinstein affair.
What?
Rich men take advantage of vulnerable women?
Who knew?
Wasn't that Obama cavorting on Branson's yacht after his exit from the White House?
He obviously had no idea either...
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Minimum wage rise to collapse economy?
Hey, if our economy depends on keeping hundreds of thousands of workers toiling in poverty, I say, let it fall! It ain't working for us!
The Metro grocery chain is the latest outfit to proclaim that the sky will fall if the proposed Ontario min wage rise goes forward. OMG, it's gonna cost Metro up to fifty million a year!!!
Hmm... fifty million on sales of 12 billion. A little elementary math tells me an across-the-board price hike of less than .5% would bury the 50 million.
You or I won't notice a .5% increase in our grocery bill. What's an extra fifty cents when you spend a hundred bucks at Metro or Foodland? If fifty cents upsets your weekly grocery budget, you're already getting your groceries at the food bank.
Metro's sacred net profits will be unscathed. All the other chains will be subject to the same minimum wage, so there's no competitive disadvantage.
Thousands of their workers will notice a real difference in their take-home pay.
How is this even cause for debate?
Come on, Metro, don't be such tightwad bastards!
Celebrate the fact that you'll finally be paying your employees a living wage!
The Metro grocery chain is the latest outfit to proclaim that the sky will fall if the proposed Ontario min wage rise goes forward. OMG, it's gonna cost Metro up to fifty million a year!!!
Hmm... fifty million on sales of 12 billion. A little elementary math tells me an across-the-board price hike of less than .5% would bury the 50 million.
You or I won't notice a .5% increase in our grocery bill. What's an extra fifty cents when you spend a hundred bucks at Metro or Foodland? If fifty cents upsets your weekly grocery budget, you're already getting your groceries at the food bank.
Metro's sacred net profits will be unscathed. All the other chains will be subject to the same minimum wage, so there's no competitive disadvantage.
Thousands of their workers will notice a real difference in their take-home pay.
How is this even cause for debate?
Come on, Metro, don't be such tightwad bastards!
Celebrate the fact that you'll finally be paying your employees a living wage!
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Warren Buffett believes raising minimum wage would hurt poor people
84 year old Warren and his 91 year old side-kick Charlie Munger were waxing wise at the Berkshire annual pow-wow the other day.
Warren is considered the second richest man in the world after Bill Gates, and Charlie is on the Forbes billionaire list in his own right.
The billionaires think we should not raise the minimum wage, because raising the minimum wage would hurt poor people.
Yup, paying the working poor a decent wage would just fuck them up.
Why can we not just call bullshit on such odious and obvious bullshit?
America is brain-dead.
Warren is considered the second richest man in the world after Bill Gates, and Charlie is on the Forbes billionaire list in his own right.
The billionaires think we should not raise the minimum wage, because raising the minimum wage would hurt poor people.
Yup, paying the working poor a decent wage would just fuck them up.
Why can we not just call bullshit on such odious and obvious bullshit?
America is brain-dead.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
American workers lead developed world in race to bottom!
Who says America has lost her leadership role in the world?
Where else do workers put in a full day for the equivalent of about four euros an hour?
Of course there are lots of places where working folks make less... Zimbabwe, Haiti, Slovenia... but when we look at wages in the so-called developed world, American workers are clearly heading for third world status.
Fast food workers held another protest in New York City today, where the Captains of Commerce apparently think seven bucks an hour is a living wage.
The folks making that seven bucks an hour know better.
These would be the same Captains of Commerce who are reverentially fawned over by the business press for figuring out how to avoid paying taxes in America. The same Captains of Commerce who would be outraged if their seven and eight number pay packets were seriously taxed.
The same Captains of Commerce who truly believe that they are entitled to more every year than what their lowest paid workers will earn over their lifetime.
Right now Amazon workers in Germany are on strike. They already make three or four dollars an hour more than their American counterparts. Not only that, but the German workers get 34 paid days off every year.
So why are workers in other developed nations doing so much better than American workers?
Do you think the fact that they are far more likely to be unionized has something to do with it?
Where else do workers put in a full day for the equivalent of about four euros an hour?
Of course there are lots of places where working folks make less... Zimbabwe, Haiti, Slovenia... but when we look at wages in the so-called developed world, American workers are clearly heading for third world status.
Fast food workers held another protest in New York City today, where the Captains of Commerce apparently think seven bucks an hour is a living wage.
The folks making that seven bucks an hour know better.
These would be the same Captains of Commerce who are reverentially fawned over by the business press for figuring out how to avoid paying taxes in America. The same Captains of Commerce who would be outraged if their seven and eight number pay packets were seriously taxed.
The same Captains of Commerce who truly believe that they are entitled to more every year than what their lowest paid workers will earn over their lifetime.
Right now Amazon workers in Germany are on strike. They already make three or four dollars an hour more than their American counterparts. Not only that, but the German workers get 34 paid days off every year.
So why are workers in other developed nations doing so much better than American workers?
Do you think the fact that they are far more likely to be unionized has something to do with it?
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Revisiting the Neumann Plan
About six months ago I wrote out a few simple suggestions about how we could achieve balanced budgets and full employment.
I think we need to add a sixth point to the five point plan.
There needs to be a mechanism whereby the gap between the highest wage-earners and the lowest can be narrowed. In North America today the typical CEO of a major company is paid roughly 400 times what the average employee is paid.
Thirty years ago that ratio was about 40:1.
If we can legislate a minimum wage, we can legislate a maximum wage.
There are a multiplicity of reasons why the worker's income has stagnated while that of the CEO has increased tenfold. None of those reasons have anything to do with the relative merit of CEOs. Rather, it has been the emergence of a culture of entitlement that has spurred these obscene gains in executive compensation.
Executive compensation has sky-rocketed because the guys in charge are paying themselves and figured out that they can get away with it.
Look at Doug Oberhelman for example, CEO of Caterpillar. In 2011, while he was quietly scheming to drop the pay of the guys who weld the Cat machines together from $60 K per year to 30, he was lobbying the board of directors for a 60% pay raise, which he got.
If there were a legislated limit to the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay, Oberhelman would have had to take a 50% cut right along with his workers.
Or what is far more likely, he would have left the workers alone.
The culture of executive entitlement never went off the rails in Europe to the extent it did in North America, and the folks there are at least cognizant of the fact that society needs to debate the matter. David Roth of the Switzerland Social Democrat youth wing has proposed a multiple of twelve.
Doug Oberhelman's pay packet would by law be limited to twelve times what his lowest paid employee earns.
Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum and Francois Hollande before he became Hollande the Conqueror both proposed a multiple of twenty.
When I used to sit around the Albion with fellow students and left-tilting professors, long before the Albion was gentrified, the multiple that came up was ten. The point being that this is by no means a new idea.
But it is an idea whose time has come. We need to get away from the CEO giving himself a 60% pay raise while cutting the pay of his workers by 50%.
Whether that CEO-worker pay ratio is 10 or 12 or 20 or 25 to 1, there needs to be limit to how much we reward the top earners. I'll go with David Roth and his Social Democrats on this one.
Point no. 6 on the Neumann Plan for balanced budgets and full employment; limit executive pay to twelve times the pay of the minimum in the entity that executive is managing.
I think we need to add a sixth point to the five point plan.
There needs to be a mechanism whereby the gap between the highest wage-earners and the lowest can be narrowed. In North America today the typical CEO of a major company is paid roughly 400 times what the average employee is paid.
Thirty years ago that ratio was about 40:1.
If we can legislate a minimum wage, we can legislate a maximum wage.
There are a multiplicity of reasons why the worker's income has stagnated while that of the CEO has increased tenfold. None of those reasons have anything to do with the relative merit of CEOs. Rather, it has been the emergence of a culture of entitlement that has spurred these obscene gains in executive compensation.
Executive compensation has sky-rocketed because the guys in charge are paying themselves and figured out that they can get away with it.
Look at Doug Oberhelman for example, CEO of Caterpillar. In 2011, while he was quietly scheming to drop the pay of the guys who weld the Cat machines together from $60 K per year to 30, he was lobbying the board of directors for a 60% pay raise, which he got.
If there were a legislated limit to the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay, Oberhelman would have had to take a 50% cut right along with his workers.
Or what is far more likely, he would have left the workers alone.
The culture of executive entitlement never went off the rails in Europe to the extent it did in North America, and the folks there are at least cognizant of the fact that society needs to debate the matter. David Roth of the Switzerland Social Democrat youth wing has proposed a multiple of twelve.
Doug Oberhelman's pay packet would by law be limited to twelve times what his lowest paid employee earns.
Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum and Francois Hollande before he became Hollande the Conqueror both proposed a multiple of twenty.
When I used to sit around the Albion with fellow students and left-tilting professors, long before the Albion was gentrified, the multiple that came up was ten. The point being that this is by no means a new idea.
But it is an idea whose time has come. We need to get away from the CEO giving himself a 60% pay raise while cutting the pay of his workers by 50%.
Whether that CEO-worker pay ratio is 10 or 12 or 20 or 25 to 1, there needs to be limit to how much we reward the top earners. I'll go with David Roth and his Social Democrats on this one.
Point no. 6 on the Neumann Plan for balanced budgets and full employment; limit executive pay to twelve times the pay of the minimum in the entity that executive is managing.
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