Wages on the Borderline
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/saskatchewan-alberta-lloydminster-minimum-wage-increase-1.4844722
Getting a pay rise in the border city of Lloydminster could be a matter of crossing the road.
The gap between the minimum wage in Saskatchewan and Alberta widened to almost $4 on Monday.
Minimum wage-earners in Saskatchewan will see their hourly rates rise by 10 cents from Oct. 1, when the provincial rate increases from $10.96 to $11.06.
On the same day in Alberta, the minimum wage increased by $1.40, increasing the lowest allowable wage from $13.60 to $15.
The city of Lloydminster straddles the Alberta and Saskatchewan borders, meaning some workers on the Saskatchewan side could increase their pay by almost $4 by finding work on the other side of Highway 17.
Business owners and managers on the eastern side of the border are bracing for possible impacts by increasing wages, raising prices and reducing their full-time workforce.
Some might point to this as an argument for a uniform minimum wage, but I expect it to more-or-less work itself out. Businesses on the Saskatchewan side will either raise the wages to compete with the Albertan counterparts, or they will accept having the employees who can’t get jobs on the other side.
Amazon announced that effective Nov 1, it will pay a $15/hr minimum wage for all US employees, including seasonal workers.
The Denver Post recently ran a story about the difficulties Amazon was having filling positions at its new warehouse on the north side of the metro area. One of the people they interviewed, who had applied at Amazon and two other large employers opening in that area, said that the problem was simple: “$12/hr and no benefits.”Report
Maribou and I had a conversation about this a few moments ago.
I came up in the 90’s as a temp worker in a Global Conglomerate company. A handful of co-workers (real employees of the company and everything) started in temp positions similar to my own. Bust your ass, make the company look good, hey, maybe you’ll get picked up too. These guys did.
This was right around the time of Vizcaino v. Microsoft, if I remember correctly.
I worked as a temp for a while and then congress passed “Permatemp” legislation protecting me and mine. I was pleased for a short while but I had a conversation with one of my fun and really skilled co-workers who was being laid off. He told me that anybody else’s job wasn’t in jeopardy or anything, management just told him that he’d worked there for almost two years and they were laying him off for 3 months and they’d give him a bonus that’d allow him to buy a PS2 and they wanted to hire him again when the 3 months were over.
I was a lot less excited about the Permatemp protections after that conversation.
Anyway, I lost my job as a temp shortly after that and was quickly hired by a “Managed Services” company (as an employee and everything!) and contracted out to the Global Conglomerate to do the temp job I had just lost.
All that to say: $15/hr for employees? Including seasonal ones? I’ll be excited when I find out whether the warehouses in question have employees working in them or whether the employees transition over to “Managed Services” working for a different company entirely.Report
A real life economic experiment!Report
NPR started the ball rolling on a discussion of a mall in CA that straddled San Jose and Santa Clara. Others jumped into the fold with additional interesting anecdotes and discussion.
If you did not see it back then, here is good place to start off into a clickhole. https://www.uschamber.com/above-the-fold/tale-two-wages-california-mall-straddles-minimum-wage-boundaryReport