Our constructive, nation-building media would never republish or tell this tale of where minimum wages didn’t do what the PAP govt claim it would do: raise unemployment. .
A higher minimum wage in practice – Christopher Flavelle of Bloomberg View argues a $10.10 [£6.27] minimum hourly wage would neither change America for the better nor destroy a million jobs, based on the case study that is Canada.
In 2014 every province in Canada had set its minimum wage at $10 Canadian an hour or higher. British Columbia, which had the biggest increase of any province, saw its unemployment rate fall by almost a full point over the same period, to 6.7 %.
On the other hand, the share of people with low incomes fell just 0.4% in four years, even as the minimum wage increased 16% in real terms during the same period.
“The link with poverty and the minimum wage is almost zero,” Stephen Gordon, an economics professor at the University of Laval in Quebec City, tells Flavelle. “Lots of people who earn the minimum wage are not in poverty, and a lot in poverty don’t earn the minimum wage – the problem is they’re not working, or the number of hours they get.
BBC Online extract
Cynical Investor
*The writer blogs at http://atans1.wordpress.com/