What is a decent wage for Winnipeg and Manitoba?

What factors should be considered when deciding on fair wages?

Should professionals with a significant education (doctors, lawyers, engineers...) earn what the market will bear? Less? Why? Do some people earn too much money? Who? Why?

Should everyone basically earn the same income no matter their job, responsibilities, education, experience?

One question you forgot to ask...."What is the meaning of life?"

I'm interested in this thread, also.
What are the stats for a worker's paycheck? Rough pay and clean.
What are the income, gst, and other tax rates and also the CPP expenses?

Why isn't orange a primary colour?

'cause it's an agent?

Hold it!!! THAT has never been proven....only alluded to.

I personally think wages should be competitive with other cities and provinces in order to attract people to want to move and live here. It's all about being competitive.

What is?

competing with your neighbors...

Is there a contest?

The neighbor's grass is always greener...
Unless.
You pile up all the winter snow from your driveway on their front lawn and it doesn't melt until September.

You bet! There is strong competition between the provinces and cities (well, at least some) to attract the brightest and best to live and work in their respective jursidiction, therefore helping to build stronger economies. It's survival of the fittest.

Really. Tell me more.

What happens if we don't "compete"? Do we die or Must we move to Toronto then?

Meh. I think you know what I mean. Seems to be working out here in Alberta as well as BC and Saskatchewan. Perhaps to a lesser degree in Manitoba too??? Always room for improvement though. Just my humble opinion.

I think $525 per month is a very good salary!
That was my starting wage at The Bay in 1968, on their management training program.
$2.12 per hour based on appx 200 hours per month!

EdWin wrote:You bet! There is strong competition between the provinces and cities (well, at least some) to attract the brightest and best to live and work in their respective jursidiction, therefore helping to build stronger economies. It's survival of the fittest.

You don't attract the best and brightest - only the greediest. One would hope that the best and brightest would be more interested in quality of life. Take doctors incomes as an example - a Physician working in Manitoba earns roughly DOUBLE the wage of his colleague who works for Health Canada or PHAC (which is about the national average). Does this mean we have the best docs in the province? I seriously doubt it.

It is possible that some people will move if they feel they are not getting paid what they feel they are worth. Especially young professionals. This does not make them greedy. Others stay as you say for lifestyle and other reasons.

The province does need to ensure public sector salaries are competitive to ensure more people do not move just for the money or leave to the private sector.

As for the private sector, make the salaries competitive and they will have less to worry about when it comes to employee retention and when recruiting. Especially when the labour force is as tight as Winnipeg's is.

grumpyrom wrote:

LivingDead wrote:

grumpyrom wrote:BTW Freeman..thanks for answering my question with another hypothetical pointless question. Seriously, what's your take on the causes of wage stagnation for the last 30 years? I'd love to hear it.

My take on it, if you don't mind my input, is that there are 2 billion people in China and India willing to do it cheaper.

Your right on the money with your assesement LD, which is my point entirelly. Globalization left unchecked will completely erode wage growth in developed nations untill we are ALL working at an equally reduced income level. It is happening at an ever increasing rate. We simply can not compete with labour costs that are orders of magnitude lower than our own no matter how much more productive we become, which is all the more reason we should be looking at taking a more protectionist stance on what little industry we have left similar to what the Europeans have done and to a much lesser extent the US as of late.

I won't even get started on China and their artificially devalued currency.

How do we implement protectionist policies without starting trade wars and other countries retaliating?

Start with little things first, stuff like the buy America policies in the US. There's no reason our governments (local, provincial, federal) should be spending a dime buying anything that can be sourced from a competitively priced (eg.+/ 20% of contract price) Canadian supplier from foreign suppliers. One good example of this was a recent purchase by DoD to purchase buses manufactured by a German contractor because their bid was something like $2,000 cheaper than MCI's on a multimilion dollar contract. The increases in tax revenues, not to mention putting money back into our own economy rather than a foreign nation would have made up for the miniscule cost increase a hundred times over.

There's hundreds of other stupid government policies that benefit no one but multi-national's but I'm too lazy to tackle them all tonight.

I have an in-law who is very left of centre. He's a retired schoo; teacher and ran for the Liberal Party. He's even left of Liberal however. The nicest guy in the world and he means well. Here's his take on this particular question.
He believes that income should be limited. With the highest end being a maximum of 20 times what the lowest is. For example if the low end was $20,000/yr then the highest income would be $400,000/yr. With everything being relative inbetween. Meaning we have to prioritize appropriately. Teachers would be somewhere in the $100k range and doctors in the highest range. He gets very disturbed when we talk about people that earn many million a year.
As for myself - I don't think this question has an answer because the market should determine it. Who the hell is anyone to say that small-business should be paying X amount? Let the free-market work and that issue sorts itself out. My belief is - with the least amount of government interference - it would have a more positive impact on that base-line number. People that work for me make a lot more than minumum wage and that is because I need to keep their attention to not work elswhere. But if I had to offer an answer it would be $12 and only because we need to make sure workers are making more than people who choose to collect welfare for a living. That should be called workfare and be accessible only like the EI program - for qualified periods of benefit.

Your answer is that $12 is a decent hourly wage? Or that $12 should be the minimum wage?

As a minimum wage I can agree, calling it a "decent" wage is a joke. $24,000 annually is still working poor.

The trouble as I see it is there is too little incentive for people to claw themselves out of that wage-scale. Be it taking courses in the evenings or weekends. Taking on additional work assignments to learn more about their job. Those sort of things.

Minimum wage jobs are for the unskilled-no education kind of peeps. Very few need be stuck there though.

The context was $12 minimum wage.

grumpy old man wrote:What is a decent wage for Winnipeg and Manitoba?

What factors should be considered when deciding on fair wages?

Should professionals with a significant education (doctors, lawyers, engineers...) earn what the market will bear? Less? Why? Do some people earn too much money? Who? Why?

Should everyone basically earn the same income no matter their job, responsibilities, education, experience?

IMHO, the answer to these questions is to simply let the free market decide.

grumpy old man wrote:What is a decent wage for Winnipeg and Manitoba?

$0.00 / hr

We need to get rid of the money system, and instead help each other (barter system).

Food should be grown locally and be FREE (take what you need) rather than buying from the large multi-national supermarket co's.

All humans have a talent or two, and we can use these talents to help one another, and together make "the world a better place" (in the words of MJ).