It's certain that the way the heirs to the Tim Horton's fortune handled Ontario's minimum wage hike will become a classic case study. Linda McQuaig writes:
Apparently thinking nobody would find out, the daughter of hockey player Tim Horton and the son of his business partner Ron Joyce, who are married to each other in a plot twist worthy of the Game of Thrones, sent a note to their grossly underpaid employees from their winter home in Florida informing them that their benefits — including 40 minutes a day of paid breaks — were being clawed back to compensate for the new $14-an-hour minimum wage.
Jeri-Lynn Horton-Joyce and Ron Joyce Jr. — whose father has a net worth of $1.4 billion — expressed “great regret” for the clawbacks, apparently convinced there was no other option. The market made me do it!
For decades, we have been told that the market is a force of nature which operates by its own rules. That's a lie:
Business advocates protest minimum wages for interfering with the “free market.” They make it sound like the market is some sort of natural system that operates according to basic, natural laws — like the laws of gravity — and that we tamper with it at our peril.
In fact, the market is nothing more than a set of human-made laws — governing property, contracts, labour, taxes, etc.
Rather than being based on natural principles, the laws of the marketplace simply reflect the power structure of society. Those with power are able to bend the laws in their own favour.
The evidence is unavoidable in places like Seattle and Alberta:
Indeed, despite fear-mongering about job losses when Alberta began hiking its minimum wage in 2015, jobs in its low-wage service sector actually grew by 12,400 last year, along with the rest of its economy.
The Hortons and Joyces revealed the lie that is at the heart of neo-liberalism. It's not about the market. It's all about power and how it's distributed.
Image: Oxfam Blogs
14 comments:
The big question is why the majority let the minority have their way. Case in point Nazi Germany.
That is indeed the question, Steve.
I was very pleased to read this piece today, Owen. McQuaig never fails to address things that need to be confronted, and her point about the market forces' claimed infallibility shows one of the lies that infects so much of economics today.
Folks like Milton Friedman tried to transform economics into a physical science, Lorne. They implied that economics was driven by the same laws as Newtonian physics. It was all a hoax. But some hoaxes have nine lives.
I think that it is important to remember that "market forces" of capitalism, left to their own devices, will accept and defend slavery with wars. That's the basic premise of capitalism in the west. SM
IMHO some of the most important thought about the dismal science can be found here.
Quite true, SM. Capitalism follows no moral code.
Classical economics has not put an end to the boom and bust cycle, Steve. In fact, it's one of its central theses.
Over-priced and over-rated coffee plus a good-sized black hair in my husband's clam chowder turned us off Tim Horton's many years ago. Their "business" practices exude greed in the highest degree.
I know they don't need my business but I certainly don't need their arrogance!
I have to wonder, Lulymay, how many other Canadians feel as you do.
This brings to mind a legal seminar on changes to the Bank Act. I was a panelist, called in to discuss the changes as they pertained to bankruptcy and insolvency. Also present was the usual "stiff" representing the chartered banks who, even though the legislation benefited the banks a good deal, still chose to whinge about a couple of changes the Big Boys didn't like and he did it with an air of righteous indignation. They were Canada's "chartered banks" afterall.
I couldn't wait until I could get my teeth into the pompous bastard. I accused the guy of carrying on as though these privileged banks had forged Magna Carta and then reminded him that they were mere creatures of statute. They were created by Parliament not to serve their own interests but the interests of the country and the people, something that generations of pampering and privilege had erased from their consciousness.
What was true for these banks holds true for all corporations. They're all creatures of statute. Their limited liability arises out of statute. We even created a legal fiction of corporate personhood that they might sue and be sued in our courts.
Somewhere along the line we lost sight of the quid pro quo between the state and its corporate citizenry. We relaxed our grip and, in the process, freed them of basic accountability and the ordinary duties we impose on other citizens. Foremost is the duty to serve and benefit the nation, a duty of good faith. We made it largely voluntary and, for that, it was honoured mainly in the breach. Good citizenship may affect the bottom line and so places the corporation in an adversarial position to the state and the public.
Globalism compounded every ill through its one-sided empowerment of the corporate sector at the expense of the state. We capitulated to the unrestrained flow of capital, plant and jobs that would never have been exploited but for our surrender of our sovereign control over access to our markets. Sure, I'll happily lay off the guy working for $25 an hour making track shoes and give that work to a guy thousands of miles away who works for $3 dollars a day but only provided that I can still sell those shoes in the existing, affluent markets.
We have to put the corporate sector back into harness where they should have always stayed. That is fundamental to any hope we have of ever again balancing labour and capital.
When we transformed corporations into legal persons, Mound, we also declared that they were "Super Citizens" -- who claimed the rights of citzenship but none of the responsibilities.
I was finished with Tim's when they dropped the blueberry fritter.
I don't know when that was, zoombats. But it sounds like it was the fritter that broke the camel's back.
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