disabilities to be paid lower than the minimum wage
(Canadian Labour Congress, 2015). In 2013, 6.7% of Canadian workers worked for minimum wage (Statistics Canada, 2014), a higher percentage of workers than in the United States, where 3.3% of hourly wage workers worked for minimum wage (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016). Women as a group make up 60% of minimum wage workers in Canada—mostly in retail, food, and accommodation industries (Canadian Labour Congress, 2015). Further, while the minimum wage number seems high, its buying power determines whether it is a living wage. The low income measure, LICO, is a common way that poverty is measured in Canada. It determines how much income a household must earn to meet its basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter, based on the size of the household and the size of the community it lives in. The LICO in 2012 for a two-person family living in a metropolitan area of about 500,000 people was $29,440 before taxes. Taking $10/hour as the average minimum wage for 2012, a worker working a 40-hour week without any sick or vacation days would have earned $20,000 for a 50- week working year—putting them below the income threshold if only one member of the family is working (Canadian Labour Congress, 2015).
“People just need to work hard and not expect handouts.” Most
people understand that minimum wage work is among the hardest. It tends to be physical, of lower status, and exceptionally grueling (e.g., fast food, retail, factory, and agricultural work). Further, a person working at minimum wage to support a family will likely need to work more than one job. To say that these people do not work hard is grossly unfair. Yet their hard work will not typically pay off in the sense of “making it.” These workers are more likely to come from families with very little net worth to begin with, and without resources such as college degrees, they are less likely to advance. When middle-class people proclaim that they have achieved with they have because they were taught the value of hard work, we need to ask ourselves whom we believe wasn’t taught that value. Further, how are we defining hard work? Is studying for exams in college (which you will graduate from debt free because your family is paying for you) harder work than working in your college’s cafeteria?
Another form of hard work that is often not acknowledged is prison labor. The linkages between the exploitation of prison labor—and the profits made by private corporations from the prison system—and the ability of corporations to influence how prisons are built, filled, and maintained in ways that benefit them is called The Prison Industrial Complex (Davis, 2008). According to a study on corporate profiteering and the U.S. prison system (Cooper, Heldman, Ackerman, & Farrar-