5 ms·

Here in Ontario, minimum wage is $10/hour. Assuming you work 9 hours a day, 6 days a week: 10 * 9 * 6 * 52 = $28,080 / year No, I don't think 54 hours / week

Here in Ontario, minimum wage is $10/hour. Assuming you work 9 hours a day, 6 days a week: 10 * 9 * 6 * 52 = $28,080 / year No, I don't think 54 hours / week is too much to ask. I'm sure most people making over the 26k probably work more than that. Yes, I know this is Canada, but it's just an example.

tseabrooks 15y ago
You mentioned your numbers are for Canada but I'd like to point out some things about the US. 8 hours a day is the norm here. A lot of the minimum wage workers (lower than 10$ an hour) work even fewer than the 40 hours that would constitute full time as a way to reduce businesses supposed obligation to cover healthcare / 401k / etc. I've seen in my experience many workers get cut off between 35 and 38 hours in a week to avoid this. I would anticipate that very few people, less than 5%, of people making over 26k in the US work more than 54 hours a week... It just isn't done that way here.
- halostatue 15y ago
  …or they're doing so at more than one job.
- Shenglong 15y ago
  It's the norm here in Canada too. There's a trade-off you need to make though, between making a lot of money, and making little. My father worked three jobs when I was growing up, to support our family. He never complained about wealth inequality; he just did what he had to. Sure, it'd be nice if everyone got paid a lot of money - but since that's never going to happen, people might need to adjust what the norm is.
rauljara 15y ago
There are a whole bunch of things I find troubling about your comment. - Minimum wage in Canada != minimum wage in the U.S. - Economy in Canada != economy in U.S. - Canada has free health care, blunting the impact of a low wage job without benefits (as opposed to the U.S. where a lack of health insurance can be devastating) - Not everyone with a minimum wage job is able to work all the hours they would like to work. And that is without touching on whether or not you think a 54 hour work week is a reasonable thing to ask someone, possibly with children, to be working at some unfulfilling minimum wage job.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  >Canada has free health care, blunting the impact of a low wage job without benefits Health care isn't free, it's just heavily subsidized. Depending on your province, you can expect to pay about $750 a year to cover your end of basic coverage. Vision, dental, and prescriptions aren't covered, and most people have supplementary coverage for them. Of course, for low wage earners and students there are various programs in place that can drop the amount you pay to basically nil. There's no deductible for most things (doctors, er, surgery, etc) either, which is handy.
  - nknight 15y ago
    > $750 a year to cover your end of basic coverage That might as well be free. I pay almost $7,000/year in California for good (by US standards) medical coverage. That includes some prescription coverage, but not vision or dental. I'm in a low-risk age group, I'll let you guess what my premiums would look like if I were, say, 50. :)
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - AgentConundrum 15y ago
    > Depending on your province, you can expect to pay about $750 a year to cover your end of basic coverage. Are you referring to the amount of tax that goes toward support of the healthcare system, or out-of-pocket expenses? If it's the latter, can you tell me which provinces those are so that I can avoid them? I lived in Ontario from birth until I was 21, and have lived in Nova Scotia since then. Outside of minor costs like the uninsured portions of my dental work and prescriptions (I know there's a word for this, but I don't know it off hand), I've never had to pay for my healthcare. Supplemental coverage - as you said, vision, dental, and drugs - are typically provided by your employer. I don't really know how many people buy extra on top of that. Maybe when you have kids it becomes more important, but I'm not there yet. I will definitely agree with your "health care isn't free" statement. It's surprising how many people seem to think it is free in Canada, but it's just a much less noticeable cost. It's rolled in with our taxes, so we just don't think about how much of our tax will go for healthcare. It's just tax. "Out of sight; out of mind" and all that.
alphamale3000 15y ago
In Canada, the standard work week is 40 hours. Often it's 37.5. 52? 6 days a week? Not every job allows for it. You want to abolish week-ends? Come on.
nknight 15y ago
As a fairly young person whose health isn't that great, I find your assertion that 54 hours/week is "not too much to ask" to be disturbing, to say the least, particularly for that kind of crap pay. I'm lucky when I can do a full 40, and I make a lot more than $26k. A LOT more.
- Shenglong 15y ago
  Yeah, that is pretty crap pay, and I certainly wouldn't work 54 hours a week for it - but that's because I can get much more, for about the same amount of work. That isn't the same for everyone. Several of my friends, while great people, unfortunately have a close-to-minimum-wage skill set. I'm just saying that these people who are making so little could make more, if they put in more time.
AgentConundrum 15y ago
There are currently only five provinces/territories in Canada that mandate a minimum wage at or above $10/hour. Those are Ontario, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Nunavut. Even then, Manitoba and Nova Scotia only made it to that level on the first of this month. Nunavut is an anomaly in and of itself because everything is expensive as hell up there - it has a ridiculous cost of living from what I'm told - because it's remote and shipping supplies is costly. Also, why do you think it's acceptable for people to only have one day a week away from work? Why is a nine hour workday acceptable? Are you taking into consideration that lower income workers are more likely to have to live further from work, and use public transportation to get to and from their place of employment (or to the grocery store, etc. but that's outside of my argument). So these people should have to work nine hours a day, plus any unpaid breaks they take. IIRC, my girlfriend is paid for breaks but not for lunch, so let's add a half an hour to this example to accommodate that. So we're at 9.5 hours per day, six days per week. Now, the worker has to walk to their bus stop - and to do it early so as not to possibly miss the bus - and maybe take a 15, or even 30, minute bus ride. They do that twice a day, to get to and from work. That's adding possibly an hour, or even more, to their day. So you're advocating that asking someone to spend nearly 11 hours a day, six days a week? My first job out of college, doing some shitty COBOL programming, was 42.5 hours per week (40 working hours, plus an unpaid half hour a day for lunch). Because I was making enough cash to afford it, I lived within walking distance of work. It added maybe 15 minutes per day to walk to and from my job. I made between 38 and 43k for this, depending on when in my employment you asked me. So why does it make so much sense for you to ask someone to spend an average of 66 hours a week of their time to make $28k, when I spent about 44 hours a week to make $43k? I'm not even including the few weeks that I had to put in extra hours - no week ever really exceeding 60 hours from my recollection - at various crunch times, since I was paid out for that time, and the outlier in time was met by an outlier in pay. My hourly wage exceeded minimum wage by more than double, so including that would only skew the calculations further away from your argument.
- Shenglong 15y ago
  So why does it make so much sense for you to ask someone to spend an average of 66 hours a week of their time to make $28k, when I spent about 44 hours a week to make $43k? Why did you include commute time in their payment, and exclude it in yours? I'm not sure what you're doing, but even in my summer internship I spent a good 10-11 hours a day, excluding commute time working. I wasn't even paid hourly. Most of my friends working proper jobs, in finance and tech spend at least 10 hours a day working - usually more.
halostatue 15y ago
Your math is suspect even here in Canada. First, for nonexempt employees (hourly), anything over 40 hours is considered overtime (1.5 rate); there may be a second point where it's double-time, but I'm not sure. So employees who can work 54 hours a week (which is an unreasonable working time, IMO) 52 weeks a year (which is also unreasonable in a civilized society) and their employers give it to them, will make more than $28k (by about $70 / week). The Federal Minimum Wage in the U.S. is $7.25.

tseabrooks 15y ago

You mentioned your numbers are for Canada but I'd like to point out some things about the US. 8 hours a day is the norm here. A lot of the minimum wage workers (lower than 10$ an hour) work even fewer than the 40 hours that would constitute full time as a way to reduce businesses supposed obligation to cover healthcare / 401k / etc. I've seen in my experience many workers get cut off between 35 and 38 hours in a week to avoid this. I would anticipate that very few people, less than 5%, of people making over 26k in the US work more than 54 hours a week... It just isn't done that way here.

halostatue 15y ago
…or they're doing so at more than one job.
Shenglong 15y ago
It's the norm here in Canada too. There's a trade-off you need to make though, between making a lot of money, and making little. My father worked three jobs when I was growing up, to support our family. He never complained about wealth inequality; he just did what he had to. Sure, it'd be nice if everyone got paid a lot of money - but since that's never going to happen, people might need to adjust what the norm is.

rauljara 15y ago

There are a whole bunch of things I find troubling about your comment. - Minimum wage in Canada != minimum wage in the U.S. - Economy in Canada != economy in U.S. - Canada has free health care, blunting the impact of a low wage job without benefits (as opposed to the U.S. where a lack of health insurance can be devastating) - Not everyone with a minimum wage job is able to work all the hours they would like to work. And that is without touching on whether or not you think a 54 hour work week is a reasonable thing to ask someone, possibly with children, to be working at some unfulfilling minimum wage job.

redthrowaway 15y ago
>Canada has free health care, blunting the impact of a low wage job without benefits Health care isn't free, it's just heavily subsidized. Depending on your province, you can expect to pay about $750 a year to cover your end of basic coverage. Vision, dental, and prescriptions aren't covered, and most people have supplementary coverage for them. Of course, for low wage earners and students there are various programs in place that can drop the amount you pay to basically nil. There's no deductible for most things (doctors, er, surgery, etc) either, which is handy.
- nknight 15y ago
  > $750 a year to cover your end of basic coverage That might as well be free. I pay almost $7,000/year in California for good (by US standards) medical coverage. That includes some prescription coverage, but not vision or dental. I'm in a low-risk age group, I'll let you guess what my premiums would look like if I were, say, 50. :)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- AgentConundrum 15y ago
  > Depending on your province, you can expect to pay about $750 a year to cover your end of basic coverage. Are you referring to the amount of tax that goes toward support of the healthcare system, or out-of-pocket expenses? If it's the latter, can you tell me which provinces those are so that I can avoid them? I lived in Ontario from birth until I was 21, and have lived in Nova Scotia since then. Outside of minor costs like the uninsured portions of my dental work and prescriptions (I know there's a word for this, but I don't know it off hand), I've never had to pay for my healthcare. Supplemental coverage - as you said, vision, dental, and drugs - are typically provided by your employer. I don't really know how many people buy extra on top of that. Maybe when you have kids it becomes more important, but I'm not there yet. I will definitely agree with your "health care isn't free" statement. It's surprising how many people seem to think it is free in Canada, but it's just a much less noticeable cost. It's rolled in with our taxes, so we just don't think about how much of our tax will go for healthcare. It's just tax. "Out of sight; out of mind" and all that.

alphamale3000 15y ago

In Canada, the standard work week is 40 hours. Often it's 37.5. 52? 6 days a week? Not every job allows for it. You want to abolish week-ends? Come on.

nknight 15y ago

As a fairly young person whose health isn't that great, I find your assertion that 54 hours/week is "not too much to ask" to be disturbing, to say the least, particularly for that kind of crap pay. I'm lucky when I can do a full 40, and I make a lot more than $26k. A LOT more.

Shenglong 15y ago
Yeah, that is pretty crap pay, and I certainly wouldn't work 54 hours a week for it - but that's because I can get much more, for about the same amount of work. That isn't the same for everyone. Several of my friends, while great people, unfortunately have a close-to-minimum-wage skill set. I'm just saying that these people who are making so little could make more, if they put in more time.

AgentConundrum 15y ago

There are currently only five provinces/territories in Canada that mandate a minimum wage at or above $10/hour. Those are Ontario, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Nunavut. Even then, Manitoba and Nova Scotia only made it to that level on the first of this month. Nunavut is an anomaly in and of itself because everything is expensive as hell up there - it has a ridiculous cost of living from what I'm told - because it's remote and shipping supplies is costly. Also, why do you think it's acceptable for people to only have one day a week away from work? Why is a nine hour workday acceptable? Are you taking into consideration that lower income workers are more likely to have to live further from work, and use public transportation to get to and from their place of employment (or to the grocery store, etc. but that's outside of my argument). So these people should have to work nine hours a day, plus any unpaid breaks they take. IIRC, my girlfriend is paid for breaks but not for lunch, so let's add a half an hour to this example to accommodate that. So we're at 9.5 hours per day, six days per week. Now, the worker has to walk to their bus stop - and to do it early so as not to possibly miss the bus - and maybe take a 15, or even 30, minute bus ride. They do that twice a day, to get to and from work. That's adding possibly an hour, or even more, to their day. So you're advocating that asking someone to spend nearly 11 hours a day, six days a week? My first job out of college, doing some shitty COBOL programming, was 42.5 hours per week (40 working hours, plus an unpaid half hour a day for lunch). Because I was making enough cash to afford it, I lived within walking distance of work. It added maybe 15 minutes per day to walk to and from my job. I made between 38 and 43k for this, depending on when in my employment you asked me. So why does it make so much sense for you to ask someone to spend an average of 66 hours a week of their time to make $28k, when I spent about 44 hours a week to make $43k? I'm not even including the few weeks that I had to put in extra hours - no week ever really exceeding 60 hours from my recollection - at various crunch times, since I was paid out for that time, and the outlier in time was met by an outlier in pay. My hourly wage exceeded minimum wage by more than double, so including that would only skew the calculations further away from your argument.

Shenglong 15y ago
So why does it make so much sense for you to ask someone to spend an average of 66 hours a week of their time to make $28k, when I spent about 44 hours a week to make $43k? Why did you include commute time in their payment, and exclude it in yours? I'm not sure what you're doing, but even in my summer internship I spent a good 10-11 hours a day, excluding commute time working. I wasn't even paid hourly. Most of my friends working proper jobs, in finance and tech spend at least 10 hours a day working - usually more.

halostatue 15y ago

Your math is suspect even here in Canada. First, for nonexempt employees (hourly), anything over 40 hours is considered overtime (1.5 rate); there may be a second point where it's double-time, but I'm not sure. So employees who can work 54 hours a week (which is an unreasonable working time, IMO) 52 weeks a year (which is also unreasonable in a civilized society) and their employers give it to them, will make more than $28k (by about $70 / week). The Federal Minimum Wage in the U.S. is $7.25.