Properly Pay Low-Wage Workers For Creating Economic Value
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region. Trevor Nichols Huddle’s Associate Editor based in Halifax.
One of the toughest jobs I’ve ever had was working for minimum wage at Tim Hortons.
I was 20, still figuring out my life, and trying to save enough money to get out of my parents’ house. Four or five times I week, I would un-crinkle an ugly brown uniform, put on my non-slip shoes, and trudge downtown to my local Timmys.
During the busiest times, the job is a high-pressure juggling act of serving customers, constantly checking you have enough coffee, keeping straight an endless list of orders, and refilling stock–all while trying to stay out of everyone else’s way.
At the end of 90 exhausting minutes, you can barely think: you’re sticky with sweat, your polyester uniform chafes under your arms, your shoes slip constantly over a thin layer of grease, and you smell nothing but lard and burnt coffee.
Then, it’s a wild swing to mind-numbing boredom. You spend hours sweeping the same 8X8 patch of floor to look busy as you wait for the next rush to start.
It’s hard work that takes a lot of mental stamina and I was absolutely beat at the end of every shift. If I was lucky enough to work eight straight hours, I would take home $60.80 (before taxes) for a day’s work.
For me, that simply meant a longer-than-wanted stint at home as I tried to pad my savings. For many of my colleagues, it meant trying to scrape together enough to pay rent, buy groceries, and sometimes support a family.
This week, Nova Scotia’s Minimum Wage Review Committee put forward a bold series of recommendations that would bring the province’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024.
Related: N.S. Review Committee Recommends Dramatic Increases To Minimum Wage
The $15-an-hour wage is great, but the other recommendations are far more important.
The committee argues minimum wage should rise not just with inflation, but FASTER than inflation. The economy tends to grow at a quicker rate than inflation, so wages pegged just to inflation don’t account for that growth.
The committee argues minimum wage should increase above and beyond inflation so people earning it get to share in the benefits of the economic growth their labour helps build.
The policy is great. But more important is how it acknowledges the vital contributions minimum wage workers make to the economy.
It acknowledges those contributions in a tangible way — by putting more money in their pockets — and not with meaningless and condescending platitudes about “frontline heroes.”
I remember one of my colleagues at Tim Hortons was pregnant. Over several months I watched her belly swell as her due date crept closer and closer.
One day, I walked in on her struggling to take something off a bottom shelf. She must have been eight months pregnant and could hardly bend over. She looked miserable.
I asked her why she was still working so late into her pregnancy and she looked at me like I was an idiot. “I need the money,” she said.
I still think about her today.
She was doing a tough job, a job many would have called her a “hero” for at the start of the pandemic. Why should she be forced to keep working long after other people at other jobs could have stopped?
She, and all of us who have ever worked a minimum wage job, contribute to the economy just like every other worker. She deserves a proper share of the wealth she helped create.
There’s this idea out there, a pervasive one, that minimum wage jobs are filled largely by students; that they’re meant for teenagers and college kids to earn some pocket money after class.
Not only is that idea wrong, it dangerously undermines the people doing those jobs.
Almost half of the minimum wage workers in Canada are 25 or older. And more than 16 percent of minimum wage workers in Nova Scotia are the sole income earner in their families.
These aren’t kids: they’re adults, living in an increasingly expensive world.
There is dignity in their work. The committee’s proposal acknowledges that dignity by acknowledging the value minimum wage workers create.
Paying people earning minimum wage more isn’t about pity or charity: it’s about giving them what they deserve.
This week, I wrote about the vast sums of money Canadian CEOs take home.
Every year, executive pay drifts further from the average workers’ wages. Seventy years ago, CEOs typically made about 20 times as much as their frontline employees. Today, Canadian CEOs make 191 times more than the average worker.
Related: Atlantic Canada’s Best Paid CEO Makes More Than $13-Million A Year
And while their pay balloons, it’s increasingly disconnected from how well they do their jobs. Many companies that lost money or took government help during the pandemic paid their CEOs more than they did pre-Covid-19.
That’s a lot of “economic value” piling up in the pockets of a few people. At the same time, many business leaders are saying they can’t afford to meaningfully raise the pay of low-wage workers.
Restaurant Brands International owns Tim Hortons. Its CEO, José Cil, is the second-highest-paid executive in Canada. In 2020 he made almost $27-million.
A pretty good chunk of that money was generated by the labour of his company’s minimum wage employees.
In a world where those employees are hobbling around fast-food kitchens eight months pregnant because they can’t afford to stop, anything that shifts some of that value back to them isn’t just good, it’s necessary.
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