One city's bold act to give workers a 'living wage'
Vancouver Sun
By Pete McMartin
April 29, 2010

On Tuesday, New Westminster city council made history of sorts:

It passed a motion that would make New Westminster council the first municipal government in Canada to enact a "living wage policy."

Notice the terminology -- "living wage" not "minimum wage." The practical, and philosophical, gap between the two is huge.

Once the details have been worked out and the policy takes effect, all full-and part-time employees doing work on city-owned property, including those working for independent contractors, must be paid a "living wage" -- defined as enough to keep a family of two working adults and two children above the poverty line.

That figure for New Westminster, according to the motion, works out to $16.74 an hour -- a figure that includes benefits factored into it. That is more than twice B.C.'s minimum wage of $8 an hour, now the lowest in Canada.

"In an area like Metro Vancouver," said Coun. Jaimie McEvoy, who introduced the motion, "where housing costs are among the most expensive in the country, the minimum wage doesn't cover the cost of living. ….

Burnaby instituted a "fair wage" policy, but only for workers on city construction projects, and Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa all have ethical purchasing policies. Only New Westminster, however, instituted a policy that directly affected wages.

The financial cost to the city?

In a sampling of 24 city vendors, seven confirmed they were paying some of their employees below the proposed living wage of $16.74 an hour. Under the new policy, the city could have paid as much as $480,000 in 2009 rather than the $329,000 it actually paid. That's about $150,000 added to the city's budget over a year, which the New Westminster council, by no means ideologically uniform, voted unanimously to accept….

It is significant that a tiny municipality is now on the leading edge of that issue, taking us where the province, to our collective shame, refuses to go. The minimum wage has remained unchanged in this province for eight years. What's the due date on miserliness?