Government ignores wage protest

Before the Anti-Poverty Committee threw paint on Gordon Campbell’s office on posh West Fourth Avenue, a well-behaved group of about 120 protestors waved signs there on a sunny Saturday afternoon (February 16). It was part of a provincial campaign spearheaded by the B.C. Federation of Labour. The protestors meekly cheered for the minimum wage to be raised from $8 to $10 an hour. Apart from one Channel M camera and the Georgia Straight, no media were present. The mostly Caucasian, half–grey-haired group listened to speeches, and dispersed.

After fighting for a year and a half, the $10 Now campaign has not been successful in changing the minimum wage. B.C. Fed president Jim Sinclair told the Straight that 50,000 people have signed a petition, and 80 percent of the British Columbians polled support the raise. But B.C.’s minister of labour, Olga Ilich, said she isn’t budging.

“It’s been at $8 since 2001, and it’s part of a program to make sure we have lots of jobs in the economy,” Ilich told the Straight in a phone interview from Victoria on February 22. “We know that the numbers of people who work for $10 and less per hour has been getting less and less as a proportion of the working population.”

Sinclair said his organization chose $10 as a goal because, even though it isn’t a living wage, it is achievable. But after many months of campaigning, it still hasn’t been achieved. So is it even a goal worth fighting for?

A spokesperson for Grassroots Women, Hetty Alcuitas, told the Straight the raise to $10 would be “a drop in the bucket”. The group, which represents working-class women and families, supports any increase to the minimum, but Alcuitas said B.C.’s workers need far more serious help.

“With the rising costs of housing, daycare, and public transportation, $10 does not compensate for these costs,” she told the Straight in an interview February 25. “There must be larger systemic changes.”

Even a wage hike to $15—which Alcuitas thinks is “outlandish” to ask for—would not cover the basic needs of a single-parent family, she said. “B.C. should wake up. I’m not sure what the expectation of the government is, but families cannot live on these wages.”

Ilich said she knows some families are “low-income,” and that’s why the government supplies a rent subsidy of up to $563 per month, reduced Medical Services Plan premiums, Pharmacare, and child-care subsidies. (Alcuitas called these a “Band-Aid solution,” and pointed out that more than 10,000 people are on the wait lists for B.C. Housing.) Ilich didn’t nail down why she considers these programs to be a subsidy to “low-income” individuals, rather than a taxpayer subsidy to employers who do not pay their workers enough to live on, despite a thriving economy.

“There are some jobs employers will pay $8 and no more,” she said. “I don’t see this as a subsidy to business.”

After occupying buildings, staging sit-ins, and throwing eggs at the Olympic clock, the APC’s issue, social housing, has seen significant movement in the past six months (such as the provincial-civic announcement November 7 that 1,200 units of social and supported housing will be fast-tracked in Vancouver). Which begs the question: just how loudly does a protest movement have to scream to get the attention of government?