There is a new premier in British Columbia, Christy Clark. One of her first acts as premier was to shred my labour budget for the year.
I run a retreat centre in rural British Columbia, and we had already set our budget when she announced an increase in the minimum wage.
In a three-stage process over one year, the minimum wage will immediately rise from $8 per hour, which is the lowest in the country, to $8.75 and then to $9.50 per hour Nov. 1 and $10.25 per hour May 1.
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The highest minimum wage is $11 per hour in Nunavut.
We hire many young people for the busy summer season, and this announcement shredded that budget while giving us a year’s notice that more is to come.
I have been a union supporter all my life and my children have worked for minimum wage for many years in different parts of the country. So the social justice part of me cheered at this announcement.
At the same time, the business manager in me groaned at this sudden 10 percent increase in my labour budget. This battle between the two parts of my brain has kept me awake more nights than I care to admit.
It reminded me of Ontario farmers I know who belong to unions in the auto plants in which they work and who also support the idea that labour laws for farm workers should be different than labour laws for industrial labour.
They are living a contradiction based on power.
In the auto plants there are many workers and only a handful of employers. If the workers don’t band together, the employers will take advantage of their disunity and cut wages and benefits.
In the agricultural sector, farmers grow larger for less return. With this kind of pressure, farmers want to control their costs as much as possible and so panic at the idea that the price of hired labour might increase at the same rate as fertilizer or farm fuel.
What is hard to see is how this focus on unionized farm labour is a distraction from the real issues.
What is real is the lack of power that individual farmers have when bargaining for their products.
There are many farmers and only a handful of grain buyers and meat packers. It is agribusiness that protects its profit margin and captures the gains in productivity while farmers continue to struggle.
Farmers would be better off organizing to lower the costs of industrial farm inputs rather than heaping scorn on organized labour.
The real target of farm labour organizing is migrant workers from Mexico and Jamaica who harvest fruit, grapes and tobacco on farms in B.C. and Ontario. God bless these workers who want what we take for granted, such as universal health care, education and pensions.
As an employer, next year I will still be paying minimum wage but the students I hire will be earning 28 percent more. I will probably spend less on capital improvements but it won’t make the difference between success and failure.
As a person and a citizen, I am pleased that the government is forcing me to do the right thing for my employees.
Christopher Lind is executive director of the Sorrento Centre in British Columbia.
