By: Dave Heder, construction worker
This week Ontario’s new PC government announced they were freezing a plan to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour by 2019. Already a lot of people have written that the Liberal government’s move to hike the minimum wage was nothing but a crass political maneuver as well as a declaration of war against small businesses. But I want to point out another aspect of what would have made Dictator Wynne’s plan so dangerous: it would mean that people like me who currently make $15.00 an hour can no longer look down on minimum wage earners.
As a junior construction worker I don’t make a lot of money. But I make more than those burger flipping barista hipsters me and my friends laugh at. And that is how I know that I am valued more by an unfailingly cruel society that pits the 99% against each other so that the 1% can continue to make absurd amounts of money.
But under Frau Wynne’s plan, that burger flipper would make as much as I do! And rather than demand more money for myself or simply consider whether we are both mere cogs in an economic machine that is nearly as cruel as it is indifferent to us I have decided to voice my outrage. Not at my employer or manager, but at my true enemy: fellow underpaid workers.
At the end of the day I am a simple guy. I like beers with friends, $2 wing night, and the knowledge that there are people in our province whose economic standing is lower than mine. Is that too much to ask?
The fact is I need there to be people who earn less than me. Now that outrage culture won’t let me rank people based on race or gender, income is the only thing I have left!
So before you Liberal elites go running around condemning the Ford government move consider this: Would you be happy knowing the guy asking if you want fries with that makes the same amount of money as you? Or are you too so fundamentally unable to look outside the parameters of our capitalist regime that your gut reaction is to label that unfair and write a Facebook post about it?
That’s what I thought. Now if you excuse me, I have to work some unpaid overtime so my boss will see I have “initiative” and then run to my side hustle as an Uber Driver where I actually make less than the minimum wage because the “sharing economy” has created a nightmarish set of circumstances where employment regulations no longer protect the work force.
