Category Archives: The Middle Class

A Race To The Floor For Minimum Wage: Can It Be Stopped?

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just-saying_thumb      By Andrew Chernoff     https://andrewchernoff.wordpress.com/

First it was Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation with his article, “The pay of government workers is way out of line” published July 31, 2013 in The Province, to which I made my feelings known about on August 3, 2013 in my commentary, “Bateman Advocates A Race To The Floor For Minimum Wage…You First, I’ll Give Ya A Push”.

Just like a bad smell you can’t get rid of, or a bad itch you just can’t seem to scratch, another proponent of the drive to lower wages——–using a corrosive and mean-spirited abuse of the privilege of free speech for hateful, venomous and spiteful unsupported comments with the intent to rile, incite anger and get an antagonistic reaction——comes forward.

Ms. Margaret Wente, a so-called journalist for the The Globe and Mail, woke up recently seemingly during that bitchy time of the month (the only way I can explain it), and decided to lambaste, insult and take undignified shots at Canada’s firefighters—all of the “Nations” firefighters—-without exception.

In her article on August 8, 2013,  “A Nation of $100,000 Firefighters”, Wente charges, “municipalities do not love firefighters.”

Further, she claims to speak and know the feelings of our municipalities and regions, proclaiming, “ Across Canada, towns and cities are getting hosed by the skyrocketing costs of their fire departments.”, of which firefighters, she suggests, are the main reason for those increased costs because, municipalities, “simply match the settlements that everybody else got, including police. So the costs spiral ever upward,”

She continues, by adding insult to injury when she claims, “Thanks to arbitration settlements, your firefighters are the best paid (and possibly the most underworked) guys in town.”

Really?? Possibly the most underworked in MY town? Hmmm….she’s been in my town??….I think not!

She claims to have nothing against fire fighters. “I have nothing against firefighters, personally. But times have changed. We can’t go on like this. I could write the same column about the police. You guys are supposed to protect us. But we can’t afford you any more.”

But she does say, “They look good on calendars.”  A sexist comment I dare say. And dare I do.

So nobody is safe. The police make too much. School teachers? Bus drivers? Janitors? Airline pilots? Ambulance drivers? Paramedics? Who is not a target for Ms. Wente?

She obviously has a lustful crush for Stephen Harper and his Canadian Austerity plan. In her desire to drive down wages, she is a true Harperite, spreading propaganda for that race to the floor for minimum wage, to increase that disparity between those that have, and those that don’t—between the 1% and the 99%.

According to Wente, our firefighters have barely anything to do, “Working conditions are pretty sweet too. Thanks to modern safety standards, there are very few fires left to fight. These days, most fire department calls are medical. To prove that they’re still needed, fire departments have been adding defibrillators and Jaws of Life, and frantically expanding their repertoires to respond to even minor non-fire emergencies. Still, there’s an awful lot of what we shall euphemistically call “down time,” which firemen fill by preparing meals, sleeping, watching television, polishing the trucks and rewinding the hoses.”

She claims that the costs and salaries for Canadian firefighters are for smaller cities, “typically the largest item in the budget. It accounts for upward of a quarter of their costs.” And that firefighters and their unions are so insensitive, greedy in the community and regions they live in, that “the costs spiral ever upward, and towns are forced to cut back on libraries and roads.”

This is one woman who has one hell of a bitchy time of the month; so much so, that a grizzly bear would be no match for her spite and hate.

“But the really crass way that the rich have of driving down wages is by subtly and not so subtly feeding people’s envy and greed…making us worry that someone else might be getting ahead, might be doing better than us. We aren’t talking about getting us riled over the wages of bankers, brokers and sports stars; we profile them in the fashion and shopping pages of the papers.”, OperationMaple writes in its reaction to Wente’s column, titled, “Let Us Count The Ways of Driving Down Wages”.

I continue with the following quote from OperationMaple’s article referred to above:

“The Rich and their Media Mavens saved the corrosive power of envy and greed for school teachers, fireman, bus drivers…all the folks that live next door and shop at the same stores we do. Let’s get agitated and angry with Joe down the street and Alice around the corner for having a job with a union, a negotiated wage and benefits and let’s try and pull them down to our situation…part time work and no benefits and lousy pay. Because when their economic situation is as desperate as ours, then everything will be ok.

They get paid too much and work too little and couldn’t we all get by with a volunteer firefighting force? Just because they are the ones who run into burning buildings when the rest of us are running from burning buildings, in Wente’s view, doesn’t justify the wage they get.

It used to be the case that when people got decent wages and benefits through collective action we’d all cheer them on and try to copy their efforts, create our own unions and seek our own collective success. Not anymore. Now we just want to tear down those folks lucky enough to have a union. The drive to lower wages by making all of us envious of our neighbours is succeeding. That’s why the 1% and their media allies, their media employees go after Employment Insurance and Firefighter wages…because it works and it distracts us from the folks that are truly criminally over-paid: bankers and brokers.”

I conclude with the following remarks.

The drive to lower wages may be succeeding in some minds, but it has not succeeded everywhere and with everybody. Are you going to let it happen to you? Will you start fighting back now, and let yourself be heard? Will you stand up? Will you get involved in civil disobedience and fight the good fight?

The drive to lower wages is nothing but a race to the floor of minimum wage. We are expected to give up more, so the rich can get richer? I think not.

The richest 300 people in the world are more wealthy than the poorest 3 billion combined, and every year rich countries take over 10 times more money from poor countries than they give in aid, according to therules.org. Find out more by visiting  http://www.therules.org

Don’t let yourself succumb to the race to the floor of minimum wage.

The middle class: The battleground of all politicians

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Monia MazighBy Monia Mazigh August 9, 2013 http://rabble.ca

Photo: Peter Klein/flickr

In the U.S., the “M” word has been on the lips of politicians from the left to the right of the political spectrum, albeit for different reasons. President Obama is not an exception. Indeed, he made the mention of the middle-class part of his electoral rhetoric immediately after the 2008 financial crisis and after hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their houses, their American dream.

Last February, in his State of the Union address, Obama declared it was “our generation’s task” to “reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class.” A few days ago, on August 5, he spoke in a gathering and he again pondered the same message, to “secure a better bargain for the middle class.” Whether we agree with Obama’s plan to revive the middle class or not, one must admit that he has been quite explicit about it. It includes measures affecting child care, dependent care, college expenses and retirement savings.

Here in Canada, Justin Trudeau is on the footsteps of Mr. Obama and his talk is all about the middle class. The only difference is that we don’t have any idea how Justin Trudeau is going to tackle the middle-class issue. Is he going to continue to give free rides to corporations as both Liberal and Conservative governments did in the past, or will he be offering a real program with fiscal and economic measures specifically targeted to the fading middle class? (Even though a lot of words are being said about the new Liberal star candidate in Toronto Centre and how her book might make up the next platform for the Liberal Party campaign). Or is he only interested in the votes of this class and then will turn his back and continue to help the big corporations instead?

But in reality, do we still have a “real” middle class? Where does the political opportunism start and where does the economic reality end?

In the last two decades, generations of politicians watched the erosion and the crushing of the middle class. Some denounced the situation and stood by their principles but many nodded and acquiesced to all the economic and social measures making the poor poorer and the rich richer, effectively shrinking the middle class.

According to a report prepared by Canadian bureaucrats and presented to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, and recently released by Postmedia, Canada’s middle class improved its average income only by seven per cent between 1976 and 2010. This is equivalent to 0.2 per cent per year. The median income of this class did not do better. From 2007 to 2011, it grew from $66,700 to $68,000, a mere 0.5 per cent per year.

This assessment is confirmed by another report that was prepared by TD Bank. The report documents the fact that low-wage and middle-wage jobs in Canada have been shrinking as a share of the economy as job growth focuses more and more on high-skilled, high-end jobs. Meanwhile, the spending by the middle class didn’t decrease. To the contrary, it continued to increase and the funding comes from the larger amount of debt Canadian families are contracting from the banks and other financial institutions, making the Canadian household one of the most indebted in the OECD countries with a debt-ratio of around 161 per cent for the first quarter of 2013. 

Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, never missed an opportunity to speak against the high amount of debt that is contracted by Canadians. The government never raised an eyebrow (until they changed the rules for mortgages). They barely reacted to the horrifying numbers of children who now live in poverty. Canada’s child poverty rate increased between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s. These are not only children born to single parents of low-income families but also to working parents who can’t make enough annual earnings to afford all the basic necessities for their families. The Conference Board of Canada reported that Canada scores a “C” grade and ranks 15th out of 17 peer countries. Moreover, more than one in seven Canadian children live in poverty.

Last July, the city of Detroit in the U.S., where the middle class was first formed by the autoworkers and later by public employers running city services, went bankrupt. The fall of the auto industry, the cuts to public funds, the fiscal structure of the American government and many other socio-economic factors took Detroit to the cliff; it was forced close shop. It is interesting nowadays to watch the Conservative government trying so hard to dismantle the unions in Canada and to slash thousands of jobs in the public sector. Yes, it would be both stretched out and simplistic to draw similarities between Detroit and the path Canada is following. Nevertheless, it is crucial to study the effects of recent public sector cuts and their impacts on the Canadian middle class, and the state of our economy in general.

The middle class today is like a beautiful woman, desired and solicited by everyone but insidiously feared and despised by all. The politicians are no exception.

Monia Mazigh was born and raised in Tunisia and immigrated to Canada in 1991. Mazigh was catapulted onto the public stage in 2002 when her husband, Maher Arar, was deported to Syria where he was tortured and held without charge for over a year. She campaigned tirelessly for his release. Mazigh holds a PhD in finance from McGill University. In 2008, she published a memoir, Hope and Despair, about her pursuit of justice, and in 2011, a novel in French, Miroirs et mirages.

Photo: Peter Klein/flickr