Opinion: Minimum wage hike a success despite gloomy predictions
Alberta’s minimum wage was tied for Canada’s lowest when Rachel Notley became premier in May 2015. On Oct. 1 it will rise to $15 an hour — a 47-per-cent hike over three years.
In 2015, the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB) claimed that Alberta’s increase would cost the province “between 53,500 and 195,000 jobs.”
In other words, the CFIB believed that as many as two-thirds of the 300,000 Alberta workers making less than $15 an hour could lose their jobs. In 2017, the C.D. Howe Institute claimed the increase to $15 by 2018 “could lead to the loss of roughly 25,000 jobs.”
History, however, doesn’t back up critics’ sky-is-falling claims. In 2009, Hristos Doucouliagos and T.D. Stanley published a meta-study of 64 U.S. minimum wage studies between 1972 and 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment