Wendy Nur, Jodi Dueck-Read, and Jerry Buckland
Inequality and poverty
Issue highlights:
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the many ways in which inequality is baked into our economy and institutions.
The crisis in care work predates the pandemic, rooted in the deeply gendered treatment and positioning of care work, intersecting with racist and ableist stereotypes and immigration policies designed to service Canada’s care deficit.
A structural re-think and systemic change is needed.
OTTAWA—Nearly two-thirds of Canadian workers’ wages are falling behind rising inflation, leaving them increasingly in a pressure cooker situation, according to a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
The report, Pressure Cooker: Declining real wages and rising inflation in Canada during the pandemic, 2020-2022, examines wages across all industries and finds 64 per cent of Canadian workers have experienced real wage losses over the past two years, after adjusting for inflation.
Ce rapport décrit la composition de la population active au salaire minimum et explique en quoi la hausse du salaire minimum dans l'Ontario en 2018 a affecté l’écart salarial racial des hommes et des femmes qui travaillent. Lorsque le salaire minimum de 14 $ l'heure a été introduit, les lobbyistes du monde des affaires ont fait de sombres prédictions. En fait, la hausse des salaires en Ontario a été loin d’être une « tueuse d’emplois » : l’emploi total a affiché une croissance de 1,7 % en 2018 et de 2,8 % en 2019.
This report examines the impact of increasing Ontario's minimum wage to $14 per hour in 2018.
Despite dire predictions that increasing minimum wage would eliminate jobs, employment actually increased in the period after the change.
The study, funded by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF), also found racialized workers, especially women, benefitted from the minmum wage increase, largely due to the gendered and racialized nature of low-wage work.
Employment in almost all industries with lower-than-average wages increased.
TORONTO— La décision de l'Ontario en 2018 d'augmenter le salaire minimum a permis de réduire l'écart salarial racialisé, en particulier pour les femmes, parallèlement à une croissance de l'emploi, selon une nouvelle étude du Centre canadien de politiques alternatives (CCPA).
TORONTO—Ontario’s move in 2018 to raise the minimum wage reduced the racialized wage gap, particularly for women, amid rising employment, according to a new study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
When the $14-per-hour minimum wage was implemented in 2018, business lobbyists made dire predictions that it would lead to massive job losses. That simply didn’t happen. In fact, far from being a “job-killer,” wages grew in Ontario while total employment increased by 1.7 per cent in 2018 and by 2.8 per cent in 2019, according to the new report.