Haiti: Civil society organisations call for an increase in the minimum wage

Read more [Infoshop News2]

New online course gets back to basics on employment standards

A new online program will help Albertans gain a better understanding of their basic rights and responsibilities in the workplace.

The Basics of Employment Standards eLearning course focuses on requirements under the Employment Standards Code and is broken into eight learning modules:

• records and statements of earnings and pay stubs;
• minimum wage and hours of work;
• overtime;
• general holidays;
• vacation;
• maternity and parental leave;
• employment of adolescents and young people; and
• termination of employment.

Rich Wage Class War, Not StatsCan

by Linda McQuaig - May 06, 2008

...[D]uring [the 1950's, '60's, and '70's] the share of income received by the richest 1 per cent actually declined...The rich didn't like this, and have been waging a kind of class war ever since, convincing governments to impose "neo-conservative" policies like lower minimum wages, tighter monetary policy, less social insurance protection, open markets and shifting the tax burden from capital to labour...The results have been grim for many Canadians, but spectacular for the rich, particularly the very rich.

read more

P.E.I. raises minimum wage

The minimum wage on Prince Edward Island increased to $7.75 an hour on Thursday.
Read more [CBC - PEI]

MINIMUM WAGE INCREASES IN MAY

Saskatchewan's minimum wage will increase from $8.25 per hour to $8.60 per hour effective May 1, 2008.

Calgary eyes $12 minimum wage for anyone doing city work

CALGARY -- A bid to make sure that anyone who works for the City of Calgary -- even through an outside contractor -- earns at least $12 an hour has narrowly passed a civic committee but could face a tougher ride when it goes to city council.
Read more [The Vancouver Sun (West Coast News)]

Minimum Wage Goes Up Monday

A Better Standard Of Living For Hard Working Families TORONTO, March 28 - NEWS When minimum wage earners in Ontario go to work Monday, they will be getting a raise. Ontario is raising the minimum wage to $8.75 on March 31, 2008. This is the fifth increase since 2004. The minimum wage (http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/.....
Read more [Ontario Government News Feed]

Minimum wage scare

Some social activists are calling it "recession spook" – the talk of a looming economic downturn and the subsequent need to rein in the province's anti-poverty agenda.
Read more [The Star (Editorial)]

Minimum wage hike does little for frantic employers

Newfoundland and Labrador's minimum wage jumped Tuesday, although it's expected to have little effect on employers who are already desperate to find workers.
Read more [CBC - Newfoundland]

Labour says Alberta's minimum wage hike not nearly enough

An Alberta labour organization says the province's 40-cent wage hike on April Fool's Day is a sad joke.
Read more [CBC - Edmonton]

Labour says Alberta's minimum wage hike not nearly enough

An Alberta labour organization says the province's 40-cent wage hike on April Fool's Day is a sad joke.
Read more [CBC - Calgary]

Small businesses down on the rising costs of paying workers

Small business owners in New Brunswick say the third minimum wage hike in the province in slightly more than a year is starting to cut into their bottom line.
Read more [CBC - New Brunswick]

Minimum wage scare

Some social activists are calling it "recession spook" – the talk of a looming economic downturn and the subsequent need to rein in the province's anti-poverty agenda.
Read more [The Star (Editorial)]

Minimum wage hike lauded - Canada.com

Business2008-03-31T22:48:13Z2008-03-31T22:48:13Z
Read more [Google News]

Scaling the welfare wall

When someone in Ontario is forced by circumstances to go on welfare, there are many financial barriers to getting back into the workforce. The cost of transportation, clothing and child care can add up to far more than a minimum wage job pays. Together, the additional costs of working add up to what's known as "the welfare wall."
Read more [The Star (Editorial)]

“Starkozysme": the French president’s retreat, Patrice de Beer

The test of a successful politician is often his or her ability to recover from a setback. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president triumphantly elected only in May 2007, has just reached that fateful threshold. Three months of opinion-poll freefall, leaving him with a current positive rating of around 37%, has been punctuated by a disastrous double-encounter with the voters (on 9 and 16 March 2008) when in the municipal and county elections his rightist coalition lost control of the majority of French cities and départements. The Parti socialiste (PS) and its allies may be part of a discredited left lacking intellectual coherence or strategic direction, but Sarkozy’s and the right’s failure has presented them with control of around 60% of départements (against 30% in the 1990s) and twenty out of twenty-two metropolitan regions. Even cities like Normandy’s Caen (said to “have been on the right since William the Conqueror”) or the border town of Metz (ruled by the right since the establishment of a [male] democratic franchise in 1848) fell to the left.

It gets worse for a figure nicknamed the “hyper-president” or “president Bling-Bling” for his ultra-personalisation of power and attraction to media exposure (an image that gains further lustre from his state visit to the United Kingdom on 26-27 March in the company of his new wife, the ex-model and pop-singer Carla Bruni). For the left has recovered from its all-time low of 36% in the parliamentary elections of 2007 to 48.5% in the municipal elections (and even its first ever absolute majority, 51%, in the departmental elections. At grassroots level, Sarkozy's France is now à gauche.

The fact and the scale of Sarkozy’s defeat to a PS dramatically lacking programme, ideas and strategy - and suffering an overflow of self-proclaimed leaders - show how much the French presidential image has been shattered. Yet the same polls that track “Sarko’s” public discredit also indicate substantial (if not unqualified) popular support for his proposed “reforms” (and, particularly for his grey prime minister, François Fillon). The implication is that citizens’ censure is targeted less at their president's policies but at the man himself, his character and in particular his style. The energy that may once have been winning (some compared him to the Duracell-batteries rabbit), the touch of glamour and danger that may once have been enticing after the long dying fall of the Jacques Chirac years - these have faded, leaving voters to ask: “Where’s the beef?”

A change of heart

The date things started to change can be pinpointed: a press conference on 8 January 2008 when the man elected as the professed “president of people's income” responded to a question about fulfilling his election promises with a terse statement: “The state coffers are empty”.

Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le MondeAmong Patrice de Beer's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"Sarkozy's rightwing revolution" (8 May 2007)

"Le Monde's democratic coup" (30 May 2007)

"A not so quiet American" (13 July 2007)

"Nicholas Sarkozy, rupture and ouverture" (31 July 2007)

"The French temptation" (31 August 2007)

"Nicolas Sarkozy's world" (10 October 2007)

"Nicolas Sarkozy's striking test" (29 November 2007)

"Calle Santa Fé: between Chile and freedom" (16 January 2008)

"Sarkozy and God" (6 February 2008)

Sarkozy may have wished to sound presidential, but his statement was read by millions of low-income wage-earners and pensioners (many of whom had voted for him) as either a breach of promise or as evidence that the reforms he had promised would at last change France for the better were failing. In either event, this was not the thing to say at the very moment the global economic crisis was knocking at France's door; when fixed incomes were being eroded by major rises in food, energy and housing prices; when companies listed on the Paris stock-exchange were posting vast profits; and when a doubling of the president’s own stipend was being matched by the glitzy, jet-set ambience in which his new love interest was bathed.

The setbacks in his popularity have provoked Sarkozy’s sharp political antenna into action. He seems anxious to find remedies, of two kinds, from the serious dent in his shining armour. In style, by shedding (or concealing) the visibly extravagant lifestyle, the private yachts and executive jets belonging to billionaire friends, the emblematic Ray-Ban sunglasses and Rolex watches, the conspicuous public cuddling with his new amour. In political substance, by reassuring his more traditional conservative voters, halting his much-vaunted ouverture (opening up) strategy towards some leftwing politicians, polishing his sometimes coarse language, and (according to his close friend and secretary-general of the UMP party, Patrick Devedjian) planning to move his presidency from a “baroque” to a more sober “classical” style.

UMP MPs, shattered by their defeat and furious over the devastating electoral consequences of Starkozysme (a term crafted by political scientist and former socialist MEP Olivier Duhamel and journalist Michel Field in a new book of the same name) have been promised that will be consulted about the government's legislative work, until now monopolised by Sarkozy's personal advisers in the Elysée palace.

The president's post-election rationale is that the meaning of voters’ disgruntlement is a desire for extended and accelerated reforms which show the promised results. But the same polls that provide some evidence for this view also suggest that 60% of the French disapprove of Sarkozy's economic and social policies as well as the key failure to bridge the growing chasm between static income and soaring prices. French people may realise that things have to change, but - after so many réformes which have cut into the welfare state in the last generation - the word réforme has acquired a negative meaning.

Today, many families with full-time jobs paid at or only a little above the minimum wage can't pay their bills and face poverty and even evicted from their council flats. An incomes policy has become much more important to such people than the public security and immigration controls on which Sarkozy built much of his support. The middle classes too see themselves as squeezed by economic forces out of their control. To both groups, Sarkozy has been unable to explain how a coherent reform package can be made from the combination of ever-expanding plans and a cascade of short-term interventions: dealing with the shortage of taxis in Paris, abolishing advertising on public television, subsidising fishermen’s gas oil, or even injecting religion into daily life.

Sarkozy's instinct to announce near-daily initiatives (often linked to dramas hyped by the TV news) that promise to act right away - often to solve problems already addressed by a bill everyone has forgotten about - is unsettling to a country accustomed to being governed by fatherly and reassuring figures, and to a society afraid of the present and future.

A new face

Sarkozy now says that he has changed, and that such behaviour is part of his former political life. He has responded to his political mentor and the former prime minister Edouard Balladur, who (in an amazing op-ed in Le Monde, on 22 February 2008) had asked him to be more “consistent” and “focused” on his policy and “to stop creating a new event every day”. He has no alternative if he wants to regain popular support; but he knows too that in changing he risks becoming identified with the more traditional style of his predecessors – especially the Jacques Chirac he loathes - and thus losing the “modernist” image which was a key factor in his rise to popularity.

The question thus remains: will Nicolas Sarkozy be able to retain his new posture, to keep focused on major issues while devolving day-to-day manage-ment to his prime minister? Will he be able, and for how long, to contain his temper and the edge of contempt for others? Even as France is beset by a host of policy dilemmas and hard economic choices, the mediacratic France which Sarkozy has helped to enhance means that a change in style may be even more important for the president than a change of policy.

Manitoba rejects 2-tiered minimum wage

Manitoba's government is dismissing the idea of a two-tier minimum wage floated by the restaurant industry in advance of a minimum wage hike.
Read more [CBC - Manitoba]

Minimum wage to be $8.50

Employees in the hospitality and other low-paying industries are about to get a raise on April 1 and many of their bosses wish it was a joke. Manitoba's minimum wage is set to jump 50 cents on April Fools' Day to $8.50 per hour, the third hike since 2006.
Read more [Winnipeg Free Press]

Minimum wage hike could hurt, warns restaurant group

Manitoba's restaurant industry says the upcoming minimum-wage raise could put some of its businesses in jeopardy.
Read more [CBC - Manitoba]

Fair Labor Standards Under Attack

Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage reached its peak in 1968. Today's cheap labor comes at an enormous cost to society.
Read more [AlterNet.org]