19 May 1999
The Ontario provincial election is off to a sluggish start as the political right and left wings try to score points and shout their promises to sway the electorate to their sides.At the present time, the provincial government is headed by a Conservative party majority, lead by Premier Mike Harris. Their agenda - dismantling the welfare state as quickly as possible.
The NDP, headed by leader Howard Hampton, announced that, unlike the ruling Tories, an NDP government would raise the minimum wage by 12 percent to $7.65 an hour.
It is interesting to note the response of the media to his proposal. In their view, the raising of the minimum wage would be a disaster. The walls of free enterprise capitalism will come crashing down!
The editors of the Windsor Star (a fine pro-business entity coddling to the Conservative and Reform parties) took aim at the NDP proposal. They argued that raising the minimum wage would "prevent more teenagers from finding jobs, increase poverty overall unemployment rates and generally raise the poverty and misery index".
This tactic that has been used for over a hundred and fifty years.
Inflation? Blame it on workers attempting to get higher wages.
Unemployment? Blame it on the workers overpricing their labour power.
Increased poverty? That too is the fault of workers too trying to raise the minimum wage.
To back up their opinion the Star bases its arguments on the studies of three select economists and an accounting firm, which read like a list of right-wing apologists for every inequity the capital system offers:
"According to Walter Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va., nearly 90 per cent of all academic economists agree that minimum wages inhibit job creation. Higher minimum wages also reduce incomes, lead to shorter worker weeks for those earning them, and higher unemployment."
This is vulgar economics at its worst especially since the reports submitted by one of the Windsor Star's own reporter's, Eric Beauchesne from Ottawa in the past few months gives a clearer evidence as to the state of workers' wages in Canada.
Beauchesne quoted Stats Canada reports which indicate working class Canadians are poorer now than twenty years ago, that wages have been on a slide, that poverty has increased amongst the working poor. While workers got poorer the rich got richer.
But let us follow the logic of the Star's editorial. If a rise in the minimum wage will cause unemployment, inflation, and poverty, then according to their own logic lowering the minimum wage would cause employment to increase, inflation would stop and everybody would grow fat living in the land of freedom and plenty.
Of course, this is sheer nonsense.
The Star's comments concerning the minimum wage hike proposals read like the miserly rants of capitalists from one hundred years ago who also claimed that a rise in wages, shorter work time would threaten the foundations of capitalism, never mind that the poor working class was dying of sheer exhaustion in the process.
Socialists know that raising the minimum wage poses no threat to capitalism. In fact, unlike the NDP, we understand that nothing much will change in the end. Raising the minimum wage will not empower workers nor redistribute wealth.
Socialists understand that under the present system workers are forced to struggle to survive by extracting as high a wage as they can for their labour power. But we also know that this is an endless struggle because the worker will never receive in wages the full value of his or her labour because the profit system itself is built upon this exploitation.
Unlike the rightwing, we do not wish that the brunt of economic crises should be borne by the working class. Unlike the leftwing, we understand the reality of the wage system and do not naively advocate management adjustments to supposedly make the exploitive system run better.
Socialists stand for the abolition of the wage system. If workers are to
struggle for anything, it should be to struggle to end capitalism itself.