This morning CCPA-BC released a new study with First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition, and the Metro Vancouver Living Wage for Families Campaign. Working for a Living Wage 2010: Making Paid Work Meet Basic Family Needs in Metro Vancouver updates the first Metro Vancouver calculation published in 2008.
The living wage calculation includes basic expenses for a two-earner family with two young children, as well as government taxes, credits, deductions and subsidies. It finds that each parent would need to work full-time at an hourly wage of $18.17 in Metro Vancouver in order to pay for necessities, support the healthy development of their children and participate in the social and civil life of their communities.
The announcement follows last week’s news that New Westminster’s city council voted unanimously to adopt a living family wage for city and contract employees, making it the first municipality in Canada to do so.
I’ll be on BC Almanac at 12:30 PM today, and CTV, Global and CBC TV will be covering the story on the evening news. Exciting times!
Kim Poirier // May 4, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Congratulations on finally getting some press Seth, and thank you, to everyone who posts here, for your journalistic integrity. I read all of your articles and feel a little less marginalized. If I were an editor, I would print all of your articles as headlines in the front page and business section! Many thanks!
Tom Kertes // May 11, 2010 at 8:42 am
City of Baltimore has a proposed ordinance that would require all chain retailers grossing over $10 million a year to pay workers the city’s living wage rate. Baltimore was first city to pass living wage law. Maryland recently became the first state. Day labourers at the state owned Camden Yards forced the state to extend living wage, becoming first day labourers in U.S. to secure living wage through organized labour action. Read about new proposed ordinance: http://tinyurl.com/35jlb7e Read about workers efforts to secure living wage be demanding that developers require all vendors to pay living wage: http://unitedworkers.org
Tom Kertes // Jun 3, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Child care workers should advance living wage in place of the ECEBC’s $20/hr strategy. The value of a living wage is in the quality of the wage – paid work without poverty. This value is retained regardless of the work itself, as work, wages, welfare and social security worthy of human dignity are economic human rights. ECEBC’s current push for $20/hr communicates the wrong message and advances values that neglect to make the point that nobody should work for a poverty wage. Not only does the strategy include calls for assistant child care workers to be paid a poverty wage, and starting many early childhood educators starting at below the poverty-level, but the campaign calls for too low a wage ($20/hr doesn’t reflect value of qualified child care work) and muddles the message on what’s wrong with poverty wages for any worker. More on why living wage strategy beats the $20/hr strategy: http://liberationlearning.com/571