Living Wage Campaigns and Building Communities | 235

Living Wage Campaigns and Building
Communities

Don Wells1

The Occupy movement’s ‘we-are-the-99%’ protests that erupted in
some thousand cities around the world in 2011 have morphed into a
growing anti-austerity politics. From Athens to Seattle, Montreal to
Madrid, London to Lagos, protesters in their thousands have been
marching in the streets against increasing polarization of wealth, income
and power. A principal focus of this anti-austerity politics is the need to
end poverty wages. In Los Angeles, New York and over 200 other US
cities, fast food workers and other low-wage workers have been
demonstrating in front of Macdonald’s restaurants and other low wage
firms. Together with home care workers, retail employees and other low
paid workers in the “Fight for $15” movement, they are demanding a
minimum of $15 an hour as a “Living Wage.”

Recently the University of California agreed to a $15 an hour wage
floor. New York State announced a $15 Minimum Wage for some 200,000
fast food workers and all state workers. Seattle, San Francisco and Los
Angeles have also adopted a $15 Minimum Wage and Chicago and Kansas
City have adopted a $13 wage (Greenhouse, 2015, 2). Similar policies are
being debated in other cities, expanding a movement in which over 150 US
cities and counties have adopted Living Wage policies over the past twenty
years. In Britain almost 1600 organizations have been officially
recognized as Living Wage employers (Cooper, 2015), and in 2012 the
London Olympics became the first Living Wage Olympics.

Supported by advocacy, educational, research and anti-poverty
organizations, such as Vibrant Communities Canada, ACORN
(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) Canada, and
the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Living Wage coalitions are
also spreading across Canada2. In many ways, British Columbia is leading
the way. VanCity Credit Union became the largest employer in Canada to

1 Don Wells teaches at the School of Labour Studies and Department of Political
Science, McMaster University. Thanks to Tom Cooper, Carlo Fanelli, Peter Foulds,
Trish Hennessy and Anthony Marco for helpful comments and information.

2 In Ontario alone there are Living Wage initiatives in at least 24 communities,
including Hamilton, Waterloo, Peel, Toronto, Chatham-Kent, London, St. Thomas,
Perth Huron, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Ottawa, Renfrew County, Simcoe County,
Oxford County, Peterborough, Kingston, Brantford, Guelph, Windsor, Grey Bruce,
Haldimand-Norfolk, Halton, Niagara and Gravenhurst.



236 | Precarious Work and the Struggle for Living Wages

adopt a Living Wage, New Westminster, B.C. became the first Canadian
city to adopt a Living Wage for its municipal employees, and Vancouver
City Council recently voted unanimously for a Living Wage for city
employees.

So what is a Living Wage? And what is the difference between a
Minimum Wage and Living Wage? A few Minimum Wages are Living
Wages, but usually they are a lot less. Minimum wages are whatever
governments say the legal wage floor is in particular places for various
kinds of work. By contrast, Living Wages are based on two normative
premises. One is a moral premise that workers should be paid enough to
raise themselves and their families out of poverty and maintain their
dignity in society. The other premise is that everyone should have the
means and leisure time to participate meaningfully in the civic life of their
community. That means that Living Wages are almost always higher than
the Minimum Wages that governments legislate.

In Canada there has been a sharp increase in the proportion of
workers who work for low wages. Wages in the high paying sectors are
growing twice as fast as wages in low-paying sectors (Tal, 2015, 3),
especially in rapidly expanding service sectors. In Ontario alone, 700,000
work for a Minimum Wage. Add another million who earn between $11-
$15 and hour, and we have three out of every ten Ontarians working for
low wages – almost doubling the proportion of low wage workers in less
than fifteen years. This doesn`t include the 11% of workers in Ontario
who are not covered by the Minimum Wage (Vosko et al., 2014).
Particularly for those working for minimum wages, the proportions of low
wage workers are even higher – often much higher – among women, First
Nations, youth, racialized workers and recent immigrants (Block, 2015, 8-
9; Government of Ontario 2012; Lewchuk et al., 2014; Block and Galabuzi,
2011).

These low wage workers are the ‘working poor.’ They are found across
growing expanses of Canadian labour markets, including retail, cleaning,
hospitality, security, care work, and other sectors. In Canada, 1.8 million
work for less than they need to pull themselves and their families of out
poverty (Cooper, 2015). In 2008, two of every three families living in
poverty in Canada had one or more family members in the paid workforce
(Canada, 2012, 28). To lift them out of poverty, they need a Living Wage
that allows them to make enough to meet their families’ basic needs –
food, clothing, rent, transportation, child care and other essentials – and
have a bit left over for things like their children’s soccer team so they and
their families can participate more in community life. Based on actual
costs of meeting these needs, Living Wage rates vary from community to



Living Wage Campaigns and Building Communities | 237

community. For example, the Living Wage in Vancouver is $20.68 an
hour; in Toronto it is $18.52 an hour; in Hamilton – whose Living Wage
campaign is the main focus here – it is $14.95 an hour.

THE BEST PLACE TO RAISE A CHILD

In Hamilton, an Ontario city of half a million, Living Wage coalitions
have been making significant gains. They have also been facing
formidable challenges. This mix of success and adversity provides insights
into the special importance of community identity to the success of Living
Wage campaigns. The overarching goal of the City Council of Hamilton
and Hamilton’s Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, a local coalition of
community, faith, policy, municipal groups, charities and private firms, is
to make Hamilton “the best place to raise a child” by reducing poverty.
Although the rate of child poverty in Canada has been declining in recent
years, it is still among the worst among rich countries, ranking 20th out of
30 industrialized nations (Raphael, 2009). Some parts of the city suffer
poverty levels that are among the worst in Canada. One of every five
Hamilton children lives in poverty, and in some neighbourhoods this runs
as high as two or three children in five. Every month the equivalent of
over 270 classrooms of children use foodbanks.

A big part of children’s poverty is due to their parents’ low wages.
Over 30,000 Hamiltonians go to work for pay – and yet they and their
families still live in poverty. A Living Wage is a top priority at Hamilton’s
public school board. Teachers and school trustees know personally many
of the children who are growing up in poverty while their parents are
working for poverty wages. They see the impacts every day in their
schools: physical and cognitive developmental delays, poor health,
depression and anxiety, aggressive behaviour, kids who are too hungry to
learn, and parents who are too stressed out to help them.

At a recent recognition ceremony, about twenty Hamilton
organizations received official public recognition for adopting a Living
Wage policy. This includes the public school board, the first public
institution – and the first publicly elected body – in Ontario to adopt a
Living Wage. As school trustee who sponsored the board’s adoption of the
Living Wage argued: “the best way to fight child poverty is to pay parents
a living wage.” Among the employers recognized was the co-chair of
Hamilton’s Living Wage coalition, the CEO of a local manufacturing firm.
The head of the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, who adopted a Living
Wage for employees at the Chamber, spoke about how his support of the
Living Wage arose in important part because he was raised by a working
single mother.



238 | Precarious Work and the Struggle for Living Wages

A Living Wage Policy is also a growing priority at Hamilton’s
McMaster University. For several years the McMaster Community
Poverty Initiative (MCPI), a coalition of faculty, staff, students, and
unions, in partnership with anti-poverty groups in Hamilton, has been
promoting a Living Wage policy. Support has been growing across campus,
including among some senior administrators, as part of a new priority of
“community engagement” inside and outside the university. The
university appointed the co-chair of the MCPI to head up the university’s
new office of Community Engagement. It was in this context that cleaners
at the university, and their union, the Building Union of Canada, made a
major gain. Before their most recent contract, many McMaster cleaners
were paid only $13.51 an hour. Since many are single parents, what they
earn is what their children live on. Now, thanks to the university
administration’s agreement to a Living Wage in their contract, they’re
making a minimum of $15 an hour.

The way the cleaners won the Living Wage points to the importance
of community building. As has been the case for many years in regard not
only to the cleaners but also to other low wage, predominantly female,
often immigrant workers, including cafeteria workers represented by the
Service Employees International Union, university negotiators were very
aggressive in contract negotiations. The cleaners were told they were
expendable and that the university could get cleaners for even lower than
the poverty wages many were making. The university threatened to
outsource the cleaners unless they accepted the administration’s `final’
contract offer that would keep many well below the Living Wage. This
threat came in the middle of summer when most students and faculty
were not on campus.

However, word got out and in a couple of days over 150 faculty, staff
and students signed an online petition to the university president
expressing their “strong disagreement with the ultimatum” the university
had made to the cleaners. They called on the administration to “commit to
paying all of its fulltime workers a living wage immediately.” As a
“community dedicated to the fulfillment of human potential, McMaster
University should be leading the way on this issue.” After admonishing
the administration for its “final best offer” which “perpetuates gender
inequality” by keeping workers in the mainly female part of the
bargaining unit (but not the mainly male higher skilled part) below a
Living Wage, the petitioners said they wanted to “work in a community
that values all its members.” In closing, they noted that many had been
inspired by the university president’s public position that the university
must “uphold above all else the obligations of the University to serve the



Living Wage Campaigns and Building Communities | 239

greater good, beginning with our immediate community”.
With public support for a Living Wage for the cleaners growing

among the public outside the university as well, the Hamilton Spectator
newspaper soon picked up the issue. With the administration’s hard
bargaining under pressure from many in the university community and in
Hamilton, McMaster’s president, often a progressive voice, announced
that the administration would offer a Living Wage in the new contract.

CHALLENGES

Living Wage campaigns in Hamilton also illustrate formidable
challenges. One is that such campaigns can lead to the redistribution of
wages among workers: a transfer from higher paid workers to lower paid
workers without helping to raise wages for all workers and without
changing the overall distribution between the top salaries and bottom
wages in the organization. At McMaster, the lowest paid cleaners got a
Living Wage but the wages of the higher paid cleaners and skilled trades
in the bargaining unit were essentially frozen. And there was no re-
distribution of income from senior administration and other highly paid
employees at the university, some of whom make annual salaries upwards
of $300,000, $400,000 and more, on top of generous pensions and other
benefits.

A second major challenge is that the Living Wage is calculated on the
basis of a fulltime job. This assumption does not reflect today’s increasing
numbers of part-time and contract jobs. These and other ‘non-standard’
jobs are growing faster than full-time jobs (Tiessen, 2014, 20; Workers’
Action Centre, 2015). Only about half of the workers in Toronto and
Hamilton have standard employment (Lewchuk et al., 2014). About half of
Ontario’s workers work less than 40 hours a week (Block, 2015, 5). So in
order for them to get out of poverty, they need either full time work or they
need a Living Wage that is higher for part time work.

A third challenge is that because the Living Wage focuses on raising
the “working poor” out of poverty, it does not address the poverty of the
unemployed. There is a danger that the unemployed poor, who are already
pervasively stigmatized as ‘non-deserving poor,’ may be further excluded.
In response to these challenges, the Living Wage needs to be part of a
broader set of policies to reduce poverty. Among them are policies to create
more and better jobs, and better protection for those who lose their jobs.
Whereas in 1990 seventy five percent of Canada’s unemployed received
Unemployment Insurance benefits, today only thirty nine percent do. And
Canada’s Employment Insurance benefits are low compared to those in
other rich industrialized countries.



240 | Precarious Work and the Struggle for Living Wages

More affordable housing is also crucial. At least 200,000 Canadians
use homeless shelters or sleep outside each year. Untold numbers more
‘couch surf.’ In the 1990s government support for affordable and social
housing was cut, and in 1993 the federal government got out of social
housing altogether. About 95% of housing in Canada today is built by
private, for-profit developers (Silver, 2014, 84). There is little profit to be
made from building housing for very low income people. Often wages and
social assistance rates are so low that many people can’t afford to pay
their rents. Already one in five Hamilton renters pay over half their
incomes on rent (Freeman, 2015). Gentrification in Hamilton encourages
landlords to raise their rents higher, forcing many of the poor out of their
apartments.

A Guaranteed Minimum Income could be a powerful companion to
the Living Wage. As an experiment in the 1970s, the Manitoba and federal
governments implemented a policy in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba in
which each family received a Minimum Income. Those who were working
had their income from the policy reduced by 50 cents for every dollar they
earned in employment. While the Minimum Income’s impacts on hours of
work were minimal, gains to the community were considerable. Children
and adults attained higher education levels. There were fewer hospital
visits, work-related injuries, and car accidents. There was less domestic
abuse and lower levels of reported mental illness (Forget, 2011; Goar,
2011). Hours of paid employment went down but this was almost
exclusively due to mothers of young children delaying their return to paid
work so they could spend more time with their children, and to youth who
continued in school instead of leaving to work for wages before graduation.

BUILDING COMMUNITY POLITICS

Much of the strategy of Living Wage campaigns in Canada, the US,
Britain and elsewhere centres on a `business case’ and on local economic
development. At the level of individual workplaces and organizations,
there is growing empirical evidence associating the adoption of Living
Wages with ‘efficiency benefits’ to employers, including higher employee
productivity, lower employee turnover, lower training costs, better
corporate reputation and other advantages (Brenner and Luce, 2008;
Fairris and Reich, 2005; Reich, Hall and Jacobs, 2005). A prominent
example is Costco, the ‘anti-Wal-Mart,’ where the yearly turnover is 20
percent in contrast to 50 percent at Wal-Mart, and where the savings in
training and recruitment costs contribute to wages and benefits that
average $20,000 more for each fulltime worker than at Wal-Mart
(Greenhouse, 2009, 162-4). Furthermore, there is evidence that, as a



Living Wage Campaigns and Building Communities | 241

result of Living Wage contributions to increased consumer demand and
`multiplier effects` that flow from that initial increased demand, local net
employment is often modestly higher as well (Card and Krueger, 1994;
Dube et al., 2010). Such benefits to employers and local economic
development are important Living Wage contributions.

There is another benefit of Living Wage campaigns: their
contributions to citizen participation and community civic culture. Living
Wage campaigns, and the values of social solidarity and community
cohesion they embody, can be strengthened by being linked explicitly to
community identity and to `grass roots’ participation. Unlike Minimum
Wage legislation and Minimum Income legislation, the Living Wage is not
something citizens have to wait for politicians and public officials in
legislatures to decide. It is a community option.

On the one hand, this local character of Living Wages is a source of
major weakness. Whereas Minimum Wages apply to all workers specified
in the provincial or federal jurisdiction, the scope of Living Wages is
usually considerably less, so the benefits are fewer. In addition, Living
Wage policies are largely urban-centred and leave out most rural areas.
And often they are an option that is not exercised by many employers,
especially those with small businesses in predominantly lower- skilled,
labour- intensive sectors such as retail, fast food, security, cleaning,
hotels, etc. Since Living Wages are a voluntary option for individual
employers, another weakness is a built-in ‘free rider’ incentive problem.
Local employers who do not pay a Living Wage can benefit from or `free
ride’ on the increases in local purchasing by the employees of businesses
that do pay a Living Wage. By contrast, government Minimum Wage laws
are mandatory, enforced (to varying degrees) by the state, and typically
cover most smaller businesses. Consequently they can provide benefits to
larger numbers of working poor.

On the other hand, the community focus of the Living Wage can also
be a source of strength, but for different reasons. Partly this is by default:
while most provincial Minimum Wages have risen in recent years, and
Alberta’s new government has committed to increase the province’s
minimum wage to $15 an hour, as yet no provincial government has
provided Minimum Wage increases that meet a Living Wage across the
province.3 And unlike Minimum Wage legislation which is largely based
on a calculation of political benefits, Living Wages are, as the name
suggests, based on local costs of living.

3 However, in some smaller communities and rural areas, where housing, food and
other costs are lower, provincial minimum wages may approximate living wages.



242 | Precarious Work and the Struggle for Living Wages

Living Wage campaigns operate at multiple levels. They focus on
persuading individual employers to pay their employees a Living Wage, on
getting city councils to adopt Living Wage policies for municipal
employees, on mobilizing neighborhood business associations to adopt
Living Wages, and on negotiating Living Wages as part of local
employment provisions in “Community Benefit Agreements” with
developers and officials building public infrastructure projects in the
community (Galley, 2015). This varied nature can make Living Wage
values and arguments part of a multilayered political conversation in
which community members, not just a few government officials and
politicians, talk about the Living Wage in the street, at work and at
school, at community and faith events, and across the kitchen table. These
civic conversations can contribute to increased public awareness of social
and economic inequality and exclusion and, at the same time, to a
stronger sense of community belonging and commitment. By expanding
the meaning and spaces of politics to include people who are left out, such
conversations can contribute to popular participation in public policy-
making. In addition to the goal of providing a better material basis for
workers and their loved ones to participate in community life, by
operating outside conventional electoral representation processes, Living
Wage campaigns can strengthen political citizenship.

To the extent Living Wage campaigns are embedded in community
consciousness and identity, public moral and political pressure can come
not only from those workers who are directly affected by Living Wage as a
`labour issue’ but also from the community itself as a focus of civic
identity and community development. In Hamilton there is broad support
across all party lines in city council for a Living Wage policy. “Anchor
institutions,” such as large public and non-profit employers (Dragicevic,
2015), with strong identification with Hamilton, such as the university,
community college, hospitals, the Catholic school board, and others are
also likely candidates for Living Wage policies. Large private sector
employers, including the main newspaper and other media firms, credit
unions and other financial institutions, the airport, and Hamilton’s iconic
steel and other manufacturing companies whose history is deeply
intertwined with the city and its sense of itself, are also strategic to
linking the Living Wage as part of Hamilton’s community identity. Faith
organizations, the city’s beloved Hamilton Tiger-Cats CFL team, and
prominent community service organizations such as the YMCA and
YWCA, are also strategic candidates for early Living Wage adoption. To
the extent the Living Wage campaign and its values become integral to
how people in Hamilton see their city, a new community conversation with



Living Wage Campaigns and Building Communities | 243

employers who have yet to adopt Living Wage policies can begin, along the
lines of “This is Hamilton. Hamilton is a Living Wage community. You’re
part of Hamilton, so why aren’t you paying a Living Wage?”

The Hamilton and District Labour Council is also making a Living
Wage a top priority, vigorously promoting an online petition calling on the
City Council to adopt a Living Wage for municipal employees (Hamilton
and District Labour Council, 2015). At a time in Ontario when union
density has fallen to 14% in the private sector, even further to 11.3% for
part-time workers in the private sector, and to 6.7% among the rapidly
increasing numbers of small workplaces in the private sector (Block,
2015, 6, 10-11), Living Wage campaigns are a way to help build
community unionism. Living Wage campaigns can promote community
issues linked to unionized workplaces, and build solidarity among union
and non-union workers to help create a kind of informal community
collective bargaining around a Living Wage floor. Especially where, as is
almost universally the case today, unionized workers are being pressured
to make contract concessions, a Living Wage floor can help to limit
employers’ ability to coerce already low paid workers to make more wage
concessions or lose their jobs (as we saw for example in the case of the
McMaster cleaners).

Living Wage campaigns are also about building intergenerational
solidarity. A disproportionate and growing number of young workers are
working for poverty wages. Although the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms prohibits discrimination on the basis of age, Ontario allows
employers to pay workers under 18 years of age, who work 28 hours a week
or less, a lower minimum wage of $10.30 an hour. Wage reductions for
young males have been particularly dramatic: between 1981 and 2011,
real wages for men 17-24 years old fell more than 14 percent (Morissette et
al., 2012). In 2014 some 400,000 workers, male and female, in Ontario
aged 15-24 were paid $11 or less an hour, and another 305,000 made $11-
15 an hour. Together they comprise four of every five low paid Ontario
workers (Block, 2015, 10-11).

The impacts of low wage work also extend to parents and other
family members, and this opens up new bases of community support for
Living Wage policies. Parents, including many who may have higher,
more secure incomes, increasingly experience the impacts of the low wage
economy through their children who can’t find decent, stable jobs, live
with their parents because they can’t afford rent, can’t afford escalating
costs of post- secondary education, can’t afford to start their own families
and can’t participate in their communities in ways their parents do.
Growing numbers of low-paid, precarious jobs are transforming the Living



244 | Precarious Work and the Struggle for Living Wages

Wage into a broader community issue linking generations, as well as
income and employment groups. Finally, starting at community levels,
Living Wage campaigns can be part of building a more `bottom up’ politics
that contributes to more horizontal inter-community, province-wide and
nation-wide politics which can foster more genuinely democratic popular
participation and social solidarity.

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