[Canada] Minimum wage goes up 30 cents today

from The Hamilton Spectator

Increase won't be enough to change lives of working poor
By Rob Faulkner

Today, Ontario's general minimum wage rises to $7.75 per hour from $7.45. That will give adults $12 more a week -- enough to buy a pizza lunch for two.

That's $600 a year.

It's a help but the increase won't change the reality that minimum wage earners live with: That you can be a hard-working employee and still be poor.

Few would argue that the minimum wage is a living wage for a person trying to live independently in a large Canadian city like Hamilton. It isn't.

Working at minimum wage brings in a gross pay of $310 a week or $16,120 a year before any deductions. In Hamilton, the Statistics Canada 2003 before-tax low-income cutoff for one person is just shy of $17,000.

If you are trying to support a family on a minimum wage, you are even further below the poverty line.

Of all wage earners, 3.3 per cent are single parents trying to support their families on minimum wage.

Last year, the Canadian Labour Congress said a single person working full-time would need $10 an hour to reach a poverty-line income.

The CLC estimates one in four workers earn less than $10 an hour.

There are 25,000 people who work in in Hamilton and yet still live below the poverty line. (That number includes people who worked part time or part of the year.)

Women work for minimum wage at about twice the rate of men across all age groups. (One in 17 women, versus one in 30 men works for the minimum.)

A large slice (28 per cent) of minimum wage workers are aged 25 to 54, many of them women, for whom low-paid work is probably not a transition.

Those with less than a high school education are almost five times as likely to work for minimum wage than those with some post-secondary education.

Also over-represented are part-timers and those in short-term jobs.

But not everyone who makes minimum wage is trying to support themselves or a family.

One in three teenagers (15 to 19) works for minimum wage, by far the highest rate of all demographic groups.

Most of these are in school; even for people aged 20 to 24, who make up 17 per cent of minimum wage workers, nearly half are students.

Two thirds of minimum wage earners lived at home with their parents or another family member.

The likelihood of working at minimum wage falls with age but rises after age 55, reflecting low-wage work by seniors: retail sales, janitors, building superintendents, nannies, cleaners, etc.

Minimum wage is highest in service sectors like retail and restaurants where teens, women and part-timers prevail.

It's also high in agriculture, where room and board can offset some wages.

It's low in highly unionized work like construction, public administration and manufacturing.