Minimum Wage

Fairness in the Workplace:
$8 Minimum Wage

publicpower means moving with legislation and committing resources to protect the safety of Ontario's drinking water and clean the air.

publicpower means it's unfair for MPPs to raise their own salary by over 25 per cent when the lowest paid workers haven't received a raise in eight years.

Howard Hampton and the NDP have an aggressive "No Enrons in Ontario" program that will protect Ontarians' savings and investments.

Conservatives: Ontario's lowest paid workers have had their wages frozen since 1995 by the Conservatives, while inflation and the cost of living climbed unabated.

While they froze the wages of the lowest paid women and men for eight years, the Conservatives rewarded their wealthy friends with tax cuts. Minimum wage workers never saw a tax cut. But their rents, transit fares, tuition fees, child care fees, property taxes - everything else - just kept going up.

Liberals: Dalton McGuinty voted with the Conservatives to increase MPP salaries by 28 per cent. Only the NDP was unanimous in opposing the MPP salary increase.

The McGuinty Liberals say they will increase the minimum wage to $8 an hour, but only after four years, not immediately. This won't even keep up with inflation. At the current 4 per cent inflation rate, the Liberal increase would actually mean a lower minimum wage in real dollars by 2007.

While Howard Hampton and the NDP have campaigned to increase the minimum wage for eight years, the Liberals have been silent. The NDP raised the minimum wage in Question Period 18 times; the Liberals never raised the issue, not once.

NDP: Howard Hampton and the NDP would raise the minimum wage to $8 an hour right away, a catch-up from 1995 based on cost of living increases. The minimum wage would then be reviewed and set independently to make it a livable wage. It's only fair.

It also makes good business sense. Local businesses benefit because minimum wage workers spend their entire take-home pay in their local communities. $8 an hour is equivalent in Canadian dollars to the federal minimum wage in the United States, our major trading partner.

One quarter of all workers are paid less than $10 an hour. Most - 61 per cent - are women. Just over one-third are young adults who live with their parents. About half have some postsecondary education. Many are full-time students working to pay for their post-secondary education. 37 per cent of single mothers in the labour force have a wage below $10 an hour.

The minimum wage was last increased - to its current $6.85 an hour - on Jan. 1, 1995 by the NDP government. The NDP raised the minimum wage four times, from $5.40 to $6.85. To raise awareness in frigid January 2003, Howard Hampton skated 100 laps of a rink for each of the eight years the minimum wage had been frozen -- 800 laps -- a seven-hour, continuous Maximum Skate for the Minimum Wage in -27C degree weather.

top