Tag Archives: Minimum wage

On Monday, the Keep Ontario Working coalition spearheaded by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce released an analysis of the impacts of Bill 148 in Ontario, which will introduce a $15 minimum wage by 2019 and a host of other employment standards improvements. The analysis raised many red flags: it focused only on costs, predicting very large negative impacts out of line with decades of research in economics and appeared to include a significant math error. What’s more, the analysis was...

With Alberta and Ontario raising their minimum wage to $15 per hour, and BC possibly following suit soon, the usual suspects have begun their predictable howling about how this is a bad time, or it’s happening too fast, or how it will simply hurt those we are trying to help. It is true that increasing the minimum wage may result in slightly fewer jobs for teenagers, and slightly fewer hours for other workers – but the evidence shows that overall the effect is positive, especially for low...

We, the undersigned economists, support the decision to increase the minimum wage in Ontario to $15 an hour. Raising the wage floor makes good economic sense. Today, Ontario’s minimum wage is $11.40 per hour. Adjusted for inflation, this is barely one dollar higher than its value in 1977. Yet over the same four decades, the average productivity of workers has increased by 40%. And the prevalence of minimum wage work is spreading. Around 1 in 10 Ontario workers make minimum wage today, with a...

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Or close to. The figure below is not just the real minimum wage, which I posted before (most recently here). It is as it says the ratio of the minimum wage to the average wage. The figure neatly shows that while in the 50s and 60s the minimum wage was about 50% of the average wage, since the 1980s it has been closer to a third. Read rest here.