BY EDITH PERRY
GUEST OPINION
It was fascinating reading Ms. McGrath-Gaudet's recent opinion on minimum wage and poverty on P.E.I. in which she uses statistics to prove her stand that minimum wage increases are not effective tools in dealing with poverty. She uses the term “aggressive minimum wage increases.”
Perhaps it hasn't. Of course, and she alludes to this, there are other factors which contribute to poverty: lack of affordable and public housing, lack of adequate public transit service, lack of universal and public child care services and funding, lack of affordable health care which should include a universal drug plan, even dental and eye care plans, free post-secondary education so students don't enter the workplace already burdened with several years’ worth of debt. And so on.
RELATED: OPINION: Minimum wage vs. poverty
A tool she doesn't mention of course is a universal Basic Income Guarantee.
But is the minimum wage something we should cast aside because it as she insists is not effectively dealing with poverty and because it is a burden for small businesses?
I am not disputing that it is a burden for most small businesses who struggle to survive financially themselves.
What I want to point out is who in the business world needs to be held to a minimum wage regulation: the businesses who definitely are not small businesses but use the minimum wage to keep their wages low.
I know. I worked 16 years for a P.E.I. business whose owner quite quickly became a millionaire.
Yet in my 16 years as an employee I was given a 25 cent an hour wage increase, so that I was making $11.75 an hour while at the time the minimum wage was I recall $10.00 an hour. This was in 2006.
Think about that for a bit. This was a wealthy business owner whose business had grown well beyond what one would call a small business.
His practice, perhaps still is, was to keep the average wage just a dollar or so above the minimum wage level.
And I, after 16 years of what I am sure he wouldn't dispute was acceptable work wasn't considered a valued asset enough to be paid much more above minimum wage levels.
The sad reality is that he isn't the only P.E.I. business who does this and that his isn't the only P.E.I. business no one can call “small” by any stretch of the imagination.
To me the issue is: who is responsible for the minimum wage not being effective in dealing with too low incomes, not the “how and why.” It certainly isn't the truly small businesses and it surely isn't the minimum wage regulation.
The real question to ask is what it would be like for we vulnerable workers usually working for non-unionized businesses and for the Island economy if there was not a minimum wage.
- Edith Perry is a battle-scarred low-income earner and New Democrat in Millview
