David Fairey, co-chair of the BC Employment Standards Coalition, contributed this critique of BC’s minimum wage policy to The Tyee last week. According to StatsCan, BC now has the highest overall poverty rate in Canada, despite its wealth of natural and human resources.
Coalition members Marjorie Griffin Cohen and David Fairey wrote a piece for The Tyee this week about the impact of rollbacks affecting workers’ rights since 2001. In Why BC’s Lower-wage Workers are Struggling, they highlight some of the most critical changes to the BC Employment Standards Act affecting employee rights and protections, along with curtailment enforcement of the Act. They also note that BC has Canada’s largest income gap, highest cost of living, highest poverty rate, and the youngest children’s working age in the industrialized world.
