In 1969, my minimum-wage job paid $1.25 an hour and a case of Lucky lager was $2.52 - two hours work for a case of beer. I couldn't live on $8 a day so I quit after two weeks (quit the work, not the beer).
Today's minimum wage earners would need over $12 an hour to buy a case of beer for two hours work.
Beer drinker or not, the beer-to-wage comparison is clearer than Fraser Institute statistics my anti-labour colleague over there may throw around to try to show that higher wages, especially minimum wages, kill jobs, benefits and training opportunities, hurting the poor in the end.
He's saying that were the minimum wage still $8 per hour, where BC Liberals were content to leave it from 2001 until 2011, the poor would have been much better off, with lots more benefits and training to offset their having to work three hours to afford a case of beer. What a great idea.
We've tried redistributing the money to the rich and the negative affect of this strategy on wage earners is significantly greater than the dreaded raising of the minimum wage could ever be.
So before they give the rest of the wealth to the top 1%, it's time we re-thought the theory that higher wages hurt businesses and the economy - the opposite is true.
Higher wages increase consumption and demand. When wage earners can afford to buy more lager or groceries, or new tires, they do. Business thrives, jobs are created.
Yes, it's time to break out some trickle-up economics.
Drive up the minimum wage, encourage and reward businesses that offer living wages, give tax breaks to companies that raise workers' wages 10% or more.
Australia's minimum wage is $16.91 per hour. Apparently, the Aussies missed the Fraser Institute's data showing that rising wages kill jobs because the unemployment rate Down Under is 5.4%
A rising tide (of wages) raises all boats. They help wage earners, families, businesses, government - and even the 1%.
But beer-to-wage ratios and rising tide analogies aside, American president Franklin D. Roosevelt said it best in 1933: "No business which depends for its existence on paying less than a living wage to workers has any right to continue."
