Make the Minimum Wage a Living Wage

NAPO is coordinating a national campaign to Make the Minimum Wage a Living Wage. National organizations from labour, faith, student, women, anti-poverty and immigrant and visible minority groups are working together with provincial coalitions in calling for:

1. Federal government to reinstate a federal minimum wage and set it at at least $10 an hour, indexed to inflation.
2. Provincial and territorial governments to raise their minimum wages to a level where someone working full time could escape poverty.
3. Employers to pay at least $10 an hour and support call for raising minimum wages.
4. Municipal governments and universities to adopt living wage policies that would require procurement and service contractors to pay at least $10 an hour.

Join our campaign by using the Living Wage Workshop to educate and organize support for the campaign, send a Living Wage Pay Cheque to your provincial or territorial premier and participate in actions organized by provincial living wage coalitions. Use the Living Wage Campus Activist Kit to organize action on your university campus.

Education and Action Resources:

• Living Wage Workshop - a two hour workshop designed to help people gain an understanding of what a "living wage" might be in their community and explore how they can take action to make the minimum wage a living wage.
  
  
• Living Wage Pay Cheque action card

Print out or order these action cards from the NAPO office at 1-800-810-1076 to send to your Premier. You can get 100 cheques for $10.00 , 500 cheques for $40.00 , or 1000 cheques for $70.00. (Note: These must be mailed in an envelope as Canada Post does not provide free postage for provincial politicians as they do for Federal Members of Parliament.)

• NAPO Fact Sheet: Make the Minimum Wage a Living Wage
  
  
• NAPO Fact Sheet: Workers and Poverty
  
  
• Living Wage Campus Activist Kit
  The Campus Activist Kit is a student activist’s guide to advocate for labour rights and to support the Canadian Living Wage Campaign.This Kit is a cookbook of peaceful protest ideas to confront a system that is gradually becoming more dependent on corporate funding and outsourcing of labour contracts.The goal is that no person that is working full-time for a university or college should have to live in poverty. The kit shows: how to research your school’s outsourcing of contracts, fairness of wages, and the results of outsourcing on full-time or part-time positions; how to create a “Living Wage Coalition"; and offers a variety of strategic methods of challenging the hiring, labour and payment equity practices of your school.
  
  
• Links to provincial minimum wage coalitions and minimum wage/living wage campaigns.

Resources and articles on the minimum wage:

The Case for a Living Wage by Nancy Langdon in Briarpatch Magazine, 2005

The Call for a Living Wage by Dennis Howlett in Canadian Dimension, 2005

Why poverty is worse than it was 30 years ago by Jean Swanson, Feb. 21, 2006

Paid to Be Poor: The Report of the 2005 Manitoba Low Wage Community Inquiry Manitoba Just Incomes Coalition

From Poverty Wages to a Living Wage by Christopher Schenk, Centre for Social Justice

Raising the Floor, The Social and Economic Benefits of Minimum Wages in Canada by Michael Goldberg and David Green, CCPA, 1999

Left Behind: Low-Paid Workers in Canada by Ron Saunders, CPRN, 2005

NAPO would like to acknowldge the financial support of the National Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the Canadian Labour Congress, the Canadian Auto Workers and the Canadian Union of Public Employees for the Living Wage campaign.