Author Archives: CanucksBanter

Lloyds Ambulance

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http://www.labourheritagecentre.ca/

Before 1974, there was no established provincial ambulance service. For those in rural or isolated communities, the absence of an organized emergency response system meant valuable time was often lost before the injured or ill received necessary medical attention. Even in urban areas, where private ambulance services might exist, companies were only equipped to handle a certain number of cases. Volunteers across the province worked to fill in the gaps, often self-trained and with few resources. Lloyd O’Brien was one of those volunteers.

Lloyd O’Brien was reminded of the importance of emergency medical services and knowledge of first aid at many times throughout his life. At the age of 18 he lost his leg a railway accident in Vancouver. A few years later he was offered a job as an ambulance driver with a private company in Burnaby, picking up skills and training as he drove one of the three cars that provided services to the community.

When the Second Narrows bridge collapsed in 1958, which resulted in the death of many workers, he was one of the many who worked tirelessly to save the lives of those injured. Tragically, he had to experience the discovery of one of his best friends among those fatally injured.

Within the year, Lloyd moved away from the Lower Mainland and purchased a small restaurant in Sicamous, a tiny town in the Columbia-Shuswap district of British Columbia. However, while running the restaurant might have been the initial plan, Lloyd soon found himself at the scene of another accident after the local constable called on him (and his station wagon–the only one in the town) to help transport someone injured by a railway accident.

It was clear that Lloyd had valuable first aid knowledge, and that, plus his station wagon, led him down the path to becoming the voluntary ambulance service for the area. He was lent a siren and an emergency light, and after a friend helped him with the wiring, Lloyd’s ambulance was in service.

The demand for ambulance services soon was too much for one driver to handle, and other volunteers were recruited. A system was established where drivers charged a small amount ($5) for transport, and money was raised to buy a Pontiac hearse for a makeshift ambulance for what became the first ambulance of the Kinsmen Community Volunteer Ambulance Service, eleven years before the establishment of a provincial ambulance service.

The Labour Heritage Centre would like to thank Lloyd O’Brien, WorkSafeBC, and Vancouver Convention Centre West for assisting us in developing this short film. We are currently working to develop more to share with you. Please check back for more!

The U.S. has a $7.25 minimum wage. Australia’s is $16.88

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By Dylan Matthews, Published: August 19 http://www.washingtonpost.com

Minimum wage advocates love to point to Australia’s $16.88 an hour minimum as evidence that a very high wage floor needn’t stifle a country’s growth. After all, Australia hasn’t had a recession in 20 years. But Australia is hardly an outlier. Most developed countries have a higher minimum wage than we do, as this chart from Business Insider’s Matthew Boesler — using data from the ConvergEx Group — shows:

minimum_wages_around_world

This holds up if you compare the minimums to the median wage in the country in question, as the OECD did. Here’s what they found:

minimum_wage_comparison

The U.S., unsurprisingly, is on the bottom but it’s tied with Japan. And Australia isn’t on top; that goes to France, which has a lower average wage than Australia, which makes up for a lower minimum wage and leads to a higher ratio.

The Center for American Progress has proposed setting the minimum wage at half the average wage (mean, not median as used above) for production and non-supervisory workers; at the current level, that means a $10.07 minimum. If we were to adopt France’s 60 percent ratio, that’d put us at about $12.08.

Of course, there are all kinds of pros and cons to that kind of increase. I went through many of them here. And it’s worth noting that Australia’s minimum wage comes with all kinds of exceptions, especially for younger workers.

Update: Another point, which Guan Yang reminded me of on Twitter – a large number of countries, including Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland, don’t have minimum wages at all. Most of them make up for it with widespread collective bargaining, which sets de facto minimums.

State of the unions

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Konrad Yakabuski piles up the negative adjectives in his description of unions (A Radical Idea For Union Leaders: Partnership – Aug. 19). He also talks about us representing “working stiffs,” which is a gratuitous insult to the 4.6-million unionized workers in Canada. Furthermore, he suggests we are wedded to confrontation and uninterested in productivity or our employers’ economic health.

I can tell him that more than 99 per cent of our collective agreements with employers are settled without strike or lockout. We are, indeed, interested in seeing employers do well because that is the basis of family-supporting middle-class jobs in Canada. Unions are involved, often with employers, in workplace training and apprenticeship programs, which lead to productivity gains for employers. For example, we have a joint venture with the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters to do research that looks into effective remote learning and also promotes new occupational credentials in manufacturing. These initiatives are hiding out in the open for reporters to cover.

Ken Georgetti, president, Canadian Labour Congress