I suppose as good place as any to get back in to the swim of blogging is Friday’s release by Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party Government of the three-year-old report on the supposed impact of the $15 minimum wage brought in by Rachel Notley’s NDP Government in 2018. Alberta Premier
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Michal Rozworski: Is this the best they can do? The weak case against $14 in Ontario
Today the libertarian Montreal Economic Institute think tank released a short report claiming that Ontario’s $14 minimum wage is costing thousands of young workers their jobs and raising prices for everyone else. These overblown claims, based on skewed and cherry-picked data, came out—purely coincidentally to be sure—on the same day
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Happy Labour Day! Despite constant propaganda, the number of workers who wish they had a union is growing
Happy Labour Day! Overall union membership may be shrinking, but the number of workers who wish they had a union and would vote to join one if they could appears to on the rise. This tells an interesting story about the state of affairs in North America as the last
Continue readingMichal Rozworski: Jobs data doesn’t say much about the minimum wage (yet) but lots about growing inequality
We’ve had two months of jobs data in Canada since Ontario increased it’s minimum wage from $11.60 to $14 on January 1, 2017. When January’s Labour Force Survey numbers came out and showed some of the biggest month-over-month losses in years, there was a slew of predictable, reflexive commentary blaming
Continue readingMichal Rozworski: What do we do when we Fight for $15
On this episode, three guests provide some perspective on the politics and the economics of the Fight for $15. First, I speak with Jonathan Rosenblum, campaign director at the first Fight for $15 at SeaTac Airport, just outside Seattle, Washington. Workers there won an immediate raise to $15 via a municipal ordinance
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Nope, Alberta still needs to raise the minimum wage
Last night, Andrew Coyne published a column in which he champions introducing a minimum income over raising the minimum wage as a radical policy suggestion for Alberta’s new NDP government. Coyne couches the column in his typical pseudo-contrarianism. Here he is supposedly advocating socialism…gasp! In reality, however, Coyne gets it backwards: a minimum income in
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