As a part-time employee in the province of British Columbia, a 4 dollar and 15 cents raise would drastically increase my urge to work. I found Ethan’s blog post on “the fight for fifteen” to be extremely valuable and persuasive in my thought towards the increment for British Columbia’s minimum wage. As an increase in the minimum wage may seem ideal and motivational for the provinces unemployed, it may eliminate more employees than gain. Large firms would lose lots of money to keep around current employees and than would have to force laying off their workers. This would not affect the higher class of our population however, this may disrupt the smaller firms and young working class.
Currently BC has a minimum wage of $10.85 an hour which was currently just raised last month. I completely agree with the idea of raising our minimum wage however, that being said I do not agree with a dramatic increase. Small increments more often seem ideal. As we have learned in class strategic firms try to narrow down as many variable costs as possible to increase the profit, hourly wage workers are variable costs and will be eliminated if the costs are too high.
As Ethan stated in his post to compensate for the higher production costs, the price of goods will increase which will lead to inflation. If shall such inflation shall such appear this would completely disrupt the economy and we could face an economic crisis. I completely agree with Ethan how this would cause much harm to the British Columbian working class and I believe that the minimum wage shall keep rising at the rate it’s going or maybe a slight increase.
word count: 280