Author Archives: CanucksBanter

Old Age Security—Inquiry

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From:   http://www.liberalsenateforum.ca

Statements & Hansard  

Statement made on 26 June 2013 by Liberal Senator Catherine Callbeck  of Prince Edward Island.

Hon. Catherine S. Callbeck:

Honourable senators, I would like to take a few minutes to close out this inquiry that I have had on the Order Paper for some time. It deals with the eligibility criteria of the Old Age Security Allowance. It is a very simple issue, but it is an important one.

As it stands now, certain low-income seniors are being denied the OAS Allowance under the Old Age Security Program, simply due to marital status.

Under the Old Age Security Program, as it is right now, there are two benefits called “Allowances” available to low-income seniors aged 60 to 64.

For the OAS Allowance, in order to be eligible, a senior must be aged 60 to 64 and his or her spouse must receive the basic OAS pension and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. Together they are considered low-income.

The second one is the Allowance for the Survivor. It is designed for widows and widowers aged 60 to 64 who have a low income.

I am happy that we have these two benefits because they have helped many seniors. In total, almost 88,000 seniors benefit from these allowances right now.

However, we have some low-income seniors aged 60 to 64 who cannot even apply for this allowance. If that person has never married or is divorced, he or she is not eligible to apply for the allowance. It creates a very unfair situation. It means that we are treating some seniors differently from others.

We could easily fix this problem by expanding the OAS Allowance for all low-income unattached seniors between the ages of 60 to 64.

CARP, which is a national advocacy group for seniors, once again called for the expansion of this program in its pre-budget submission in 2013. The submission notes that almost 20 per cent of single older women live in poverty, and that unattached older women as a group have one of the highest rates of poverty in Canada.

It is unacceptable that the federal government is excluding one group of low-income people who really need assistance. They are excluded just because they have never been married or they are divorced.

I would urge the federal government to fix the criteria so that everyone in that age group will be treated fairly.

Marine Drive Golf Club Lockout Enters Third-Week: workers rallied at Club today

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August 12, 2013   http://www.uniteherelocal40.org/

The lockout of food and beverage workers by the exclusive Marine Drive Golf Club has now entered its third week. The Club, one of Vancouver’s most prestigious private golf clubs in which an initiation fee can cost $75,000, locked out its servers, cooks, bartenders, locker room attendants and janitors on July 26.  The lockout affects 48 workers who work in the Bullpen (Men’s Lounge), the Mixed Grill, the dining room as well as those who work in the women and men’s locker rooms.   Many of the workers are long-term employees of the Club, some with more than 30 years of service.

The Club has refused to let workers return to work and has terminated workers’ medical benefits.  The workers are members of UNITE HERE Local 40. 

Management enforced the lockout after workers turned down the company’s long-standing proposal offering average wage increases of only $0.17 cents.   The Club’s proposal reneges on an earlier promise made by Club Management in 2010 to offer a better agreement during this current round of bargaining.  In 2010, when the Club was struggling financially, workers agreed to minimal wage increases and made other sacrifices for the good of the Club.  At the time, the Chief Operating Officer of the Club told workers the Club would “do better” by the food and beverage staff during the 2013 round of bargaining.  Instead, the Club has locked out workers – a move that was particularly unexpected given relatively smooth labour-management relations in previous years. 

Meanwhile, the Club’s financial performance has bounced back.  In May, Club COO, Ron Pauls, told BC Business (May 6, 2013), that the Club had turned its performance around:

“In 2011, we hit it out of the park and added 160 new members.  We’re bucking the trend.  But for us it’s not about cash for the present, it’s about maintaining a fun, vibrant, healthy and sustainable club for years to come.” 

In spite of the lockout, workers and Local 40 have been willing to continue bargaining with the Club in order to reach a settlement and resolve outstanding issues.

Supersize Those Wages, McDonald’s

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Leo W. Gerard   Leo W. Gerard International President, United Steelworkers   http://www.huffingtonpost.com

August 12, 2013

Last month, McDonald’s gave its workers a little gift — a budget purporting to show how to survive on the starvation wages the burger behemoth pays. The bizarre financial plan made millionaire McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson look like a real clown.

Wearing oversized Ronald McDonald shoes, the CEO stepped in it big time when his budget suggested workers subsist with no money set aside for food, clothing or even soap to scrub off deep-fryer stench. To secure the laughable amount of $20 a month for health insurance, the McDonald’s budget requires the worker to take a second job. The McDonald’s plan: work 80 hours a week; but don’t eat. No happy meals. Not one.

More money would work so much better for McDonald’s employees than Thompson’s recommendation that they forego food or rely on food stamps. And welfare. And public housing. And Medicaid. That’s the real McDonald’s budget. Like other employers paying minimum wage or slightly more, McDonald’s leans on taxpayers to subsidize the payroll. Taxpayers cover the cost of McDonald’s workers’ health care and a big portion of their housing and food costs. The vastly profitable McDonald’s corporation is an unabashed welfare recipient. Coronate Ronald McDonald Welfare King. Sound the trumpets!

The payroll subsidy that low-wage paying corporations collect through welfare programs is way more valuable than the million dollar prize in McDonald’s Monopoly game. The U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce calculated what it costs taxpayers to prop up low-wage workers at a Walmart Supercenter. It’s as much as $1.7 million a year. For one store. That’s $5,815 a year for each Walmart worker that taxpayers fork over. No wonder the Walton family is the richest in the world. They win McWelfare Monopoly every day.

In fairytale McDonaldland, low-wage workers are teenagers flipping burgers to buy the newest video game system or expensive prom dress. In reality, low-wage workers are adults. Nearly 70 percent are 20 or older. And they’re not getting younger. The average age of low-wage workers increased 2.6 years since 1979. More than a quarter of them have children. The name of McDonald’s purple blob character describes life for them — “Grimace.”

There’s trouble in real-life McDonaldland now. Since late last year, in cities across the country, low-pay workers have banded together with community organizations, churches and unions to demand a wage increase. They’ve demonstrated, rallied and conducted one-hour and one-day walk outs.

The value of the minimum wage has declined since 1968 when it was worth $10.56 an hour in today’s terms. Now, it’s $7.25. It has not increased in four years. President Obama and Democrats in Congress are calling for it to rise to $9 or $10 an hour. Many low-wage demonstrators, however, are demanding something closer to a living wage – $15 an hour.

One of them, Christopher Drumgold, 32, a father of two earning $7.40 an hour at a McDonald’s in Detroit, told Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times, “Fifteen dollars an hour would be great — we’d be able to pay our living costs. . . On what I’m earning right now you have to choose between paying your rent and eating the next day.”

In other words, $15 an hour from McDonalds would liberate him from reliance on government assistance because he’d be paid enough to cover his expenses. It would mean taxpayers could stop subsidizing McDonald’s payroll.

McDonald’s, Walmart and other low-wage-paying, highly profitable corporations are shelling out a lot of money — not to their struggling workers — but to lobbyists to fight state and federal efforts to increase the minimum wage. They’re demanding that taxpayers continue to bankroll their businesses.

These corporations could pay workers more. But they are happy on the dole. There’s plenty of evidence that it’s possible to increase wages. For one thing, they already pay more in some places, like San Francisco, where the minimum wage is $10.55 and in Washington State, where it’s $9.19. In France, McDonald’s pays the equivalent of $12 at 1,200 thriving franchises.

In June, more than 100 economists signed a petition to raise the minimum wage to $10.50. In an attached report, they note that McDonald’s could cover half of the cost of that wage increase by raising the price of a Big Mac by one nickel. Mickey D patrons would still be “lovin’ it” at $4.05.

Here’s another telling example: McDonald’s spent $6 billion to repurchase shares and dividends in 2011 — the equivalent of $3,500 for each of its 1.7 million restaurant workers worldwide. The Hamburglar gave all of the money to stockholders and none of it to the people whose labor produced the profits.

And there’s this: Last year, McDonald’s more than tripled the compensation packages for its new CEO Thompson and for the man he replaced. Tripled. Thompson’s pay went from $4.1 million to $13.8 million.

The “Fight for Fifteen” workers are asking for just slightly more than double, from their current $15,000 a year before taxes to $31,200. They’d gracefully forego the free company car and free vacation rides in the McDonald’s jet that Thompson gets. They’d be OK with Thompson pulling down 442 times their pay as long as they could cover their own bills.

McDonald’s workers don’t need budgeting help from millionaire CEOs. What they need is for McDonald’s to supersize their wages. McDonald’s $1.3 billion in first quarter profits didn’t magically rain down from Golden Arches. The labor of McDonald’s workers produced it. McDonald’s led the nation in creating fast food. It’s time for it to lead again by stepping up and paying its workers a living wage. The nation’s 3.6 million minimum wage workers deserve a bigger piece of that McApple pie.

Leo W. Gerard, is the International President of the United Steelworkers (USW) union.
He also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee.
President Barack Obama appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He helped create the Washington-based public interest group, Alliance for American Manufacturing.
He is a member of the IndustriALL Global Labor federation and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union, with leaders of the UK-based manufacturing union Unite.
The USW (United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union). is the largest manufacturing union in North America, representing 1.2 million active and retired industrial and service sector workers in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

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Canada: Billions in profit, cuts for local workers, scab-brewed beer for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians!

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http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net

The war to set global labour standards in the brewing industry is being fought in the Canadian city of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

On one side, the Canadian division of the world’s largest (and very profitable) brewing corporation, Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev).

On the other, one of the global giant’s smallest and most vulnerable local unions in what appears to be an attempt to establish a pattern of concessions and roll-backs that the corporation could then try to impose on all of its other unionized workers around the world.

The workers, who are members of the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public Employees (NAPE/NUPGE), have been on strike since April 10. Before they were in a legal position to exercise their right to strike, the company attempted to force the workers to train the scabs who are now doing their jobs.

AB InBev and its shareholders enjoy their massive profits thanks to the loyal and careful labour of workers around the world, just like those in St. John’s. But if the corporation sees fit to demand that they accept concessions for the sake of a tiny bit more in profit, what will stop it from demanding similar concessions from its workers around the world?

Please go to:  http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1867 and write to AB InBev and demand that they treat their workers, and their workers’ communities, with fairness and respect.

Labour force numbers worse than they look

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Jim StanfordBy Jim Stanford  August 12, 2013  http://rabble.ca

Last week’s Labour Force numbers provide more evidence that Canada’s labour market is still mired in a three-year funk. Following one year of decent recovery from mid-2009 (the trough of the recession) to mid-2010, driven mostly by extraordinary monetary and fiscal stimulus, further progress has been stalled ever since.

Most headlines focus on the unemployment rate, but that is a misleading indicator — especially during sluggish times (when many workers give up looking for non-existent jobs, and hence disappear from the official unemployment rolls). The Canadian unemployment rate rose to 7.2 per cent in July, and is now just a smidge below the U.S. rate (7.4 per cent). Conceivably those two lines could cross imminently, casting some additional symbolic doubt on the Harper government’s broken-record claim that Canada survived the recession much better than other industrial countries. As previously noted, adjusted for population, Canada’s labour market performance since 2008 has clearly been worse than most other industrial countries.

The employment rate is a better indicator of labour market performance (relative to population trends), and by that measure July’s performance was even worse than the headline unemployment number seems to suggest. Labour force participation declined one-fifth of a percentage point in July; its decline has continued despite the so-called “recovery.” Indeed, at 66.5 per cent of the working age population this month’s participation rate (tied with April) is now at the lowest level since early 2002. This exodus of workers from the formal labour market helps to artificially suppress the official unemployment rate.

The employment rate also declined a fifth of a point, to 61.7 per cent. That’s lower than June 2010, the level reached after just the first year of stimulus-fuelled recovery (and not much better than the miserable 61.3 per cent recorded at the trough of the recession). Summer of 2010 is when governments shifted from stimulus to austerity, and the recovery stalled. (Erin Weir’s post illuminates the strong link between austerity and the falling employment numbers.) Job-creation for the past 3 years has only just kept up with population growth. The decline in the unemployment rate over the past three years is thus purely due to Canadians abandoning the labour market in droves. That’s hardly an accomplishment; it implies isolation, inactivity and poverty.

At the pre-recession participation rate (67.8 per cent), July’s unemployment rate would have been over 9 per cent. Add in involuntary part-time workers and other pools of hidden unemployed (e.g. those waiting for a job to start), and Canada’s true unemployment rate is over 12 per cent — or over 2.3 million people.

The painful reality is this: Labour is not scarce; jobs are scarce. And Canada’s labour market is not healthy; it’s been stalled in recession-like conditions for years. So much for the myth of Canadian exceptionalism.

Jim Stanford is an economist with CAW.