Brother, Can’t You Spare More Than A Nickel?
Mark Leger is the editor of Huddle. This is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region.
It was a moment in my life I’m not especially proud of, but one that came to mind earlier this week when I learned about the five-cent increase to the minimum wage in New Brunswick.
In the late 1980s, I worked in a pizza restaurant in Halifax while I was an undergraduate student at Dalhousie University. I started as a cook and eventually became a waiter, which meant I could supplement my minimum wage job with higher tips.
One Friday night we were short-staffed, and I ended up waiting tables alone. The place was full most of the night, and I raced from table to table doing my best to keep up. Inevitably, service slowed down and I made some mistakes. Most people were kind and forgiving, except for one man who was there with his young kids. When he came up to pay on his way out, he looked stone-faced at me and placed some Canadian Tire money on the counter for a tip. In a fit of pique, I balled up the “money” and tossed it at his feet as he turned to leave.
Again, not proud of how I reacted but I was 21 and had a long night. Now a father who knows what it’s like to have kids in a restaurant for a long stretch of time, I’m pretty forgiving of him too.
I thought of this long-ago incident this week when the New Brunswick government announced a five-cent increase to the minimum wage on April 1, from $11.70 per hour to $11.75. That’s 40 cents more for an eight-hour day or $2 more a week. As Abram Lutes of the New Brunswick Common Front for Social Justice told CBC, “The amount is so small that it begs the question why announce it in the first place.”
The announcement invited reactions of disbelief and scorn on social media, and inspired a satirical piece in The Manatee, “New Brunswick man frozen in ice since 1855 thinks 5 cent wage hike quite generous.”
To me, it seemed like an insulting gesture toward low-wage earners, which is why it brought back memories of that night in the restaurant more than 30 years ago. Of course, it’s a tenuous analogy. I was the target of a frustrated dad; the provincial government had no malicious intent with its announcement. It was an act of bureaucratic indifference, the product of a formula to determine minimum wage increases every year.
The pay bumps are tied to the consumer price index, which the government said grew by 0.22 percent in the last year. It rose by 1.7 percent in 2019, which led to a 20-cent minimum wage bump in 2020.
The intention, says the government, is to create predictable and manageable pay increases for businesses that rely on low-wage employees. The government says there are currently around 20,000 minimum wage earners in the province or about six percent of the paid workforce.
With these kinds of modest increases (20 cents isn’t much of a hike either) New Brunswick is a long way from adopting what anti-poverty activists have labelled a “living wage.” In a report produced last year by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Saint John Human Development Council, researchers calculated the “living wage” in Saint John to be $19.55 per hour and $21.80 in Halifax.
By these standards, all of the Maritime provinces are lagging behind, though New Brunswick still has the lowest rate. In Nova Scotia, the minimum wage will increase to $12.95 on April 1, a 40-cent increase over last year. Prince Edward Island will have the highest minimum wage at $13.
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The debate is understandably controversial, with employees deserving a living wage and employers needing to control costs, especially during a pandemic when many of them are just trying to stay in business.
But low-wage workers deserve our respect and more money, something that was emphasized in the early days of the pandemic, with companies like Walmart instituting temporary pay hikes. We treated them like front-line workers who were taking risks to staff fast food outlets and grocery stores.
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We need to bring that generous spirit into our policy formulations. Last year, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the Nova Scotia government surprised many by increasing the province’s minimum wage up by $1 an hour – far higher than the review committee recommended.
“All Nova Scotians should benefit from our province’s economic growth and steadily improving business environment,” then-Premier Stephen McNeil said at the time. “We are committed to moving forward in a balanced way by making changes that benefit both workers and businesses.”
That may seem like too big a hike in the current climate, but McNeil’s example is worth following. Sometimes you have to set aside formulas and come up with a more human, generous solution.
Like many people, I started tipping low-wage, frontline staff more generously during the pandemic.
I can’t imagine how sheepish I’d feel if I only dropped a nickel in the tip jar. It’d feel like giving them Canadian Tire money for their efforts.
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