Vancouver City Council Votes to End Living Wage Policy
A bustling Vancouver street | Photo Credit: City of Vancouver
Vancouver City Council has decided to end the city’s living wage certification policy after five years due to skyrocketing living costs. The policy mandates the city to pay its workers the hourly amount required to support a family of four. The decision was announced on Mar. 2; voting, however, occurred on Jan. 31 at a meeting held in camera.
A meeting held in camera means councillors cannot share what occurred or how their peers voted.
This year, Living Wages for Families Campaign (LWFC) BC set the wage at $24.08 for Metro Vancouver, a 17 per cent increase from last year. The LWFC promotes government policies that help families afford basic necessities by encouraging employers to pay a living wage.
According to the LWFC website, they calculate a living wage based on food expenses, clothing, rental housing, childcare, transportation, and savings to cover illnesses or crises for a family with two parents and two children in Metro Vancouver.
Vancouver City Hall | Photo Credit: Oliver Crook/Getty Images via North Shore News
With the cancellation of the policy, the city is now paying wages based on a five-year moving average of the living wage.
Anastasia French, manager of LWCF, told The Vancouver Sun that a five-year moving average is based on the average of living wages since 2018. French explained that a full-time worker earning a living wage at 35 hours a week could make around $43,825 in a year. With the five-year rolling average in place, the worker will now make $38,038.
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim commented at a news conference, "We're committed to making sure that the City of Vancouver is competitive in terms of wages, benefits and work environment. And so what we need to do is look at these things holistically, and it's our goal to be a best employer […] and we will do everything we can to be a best employer."
CBC reports councillor Christine Boyle deemed this change unacceptable. "It gets more expensive to live in this city every day. We should be figuring out how to pay working people enough to live here, not making it harder and harder for them to make ends meet," she commented in a written statement to CBC. Both Green Party councillors voted to keep the policy.
“It gets more expensive to live in this city every day. We should be figuring out how to pay working people enough to live here, not making it harder and harder for them to make ends meet.”
Many unions are attempting to reverse this change. The Hospital Employees Union (HEU) released a statement stating that councillors voting to change the living wage policy demonstrates that they are “out of touch with how inflation and rising costs play out in workers’ day-to-day lives.”
According to a statement released by Simon Fraser University (SFU), the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU), representing around 3,500 support staff at SFU, has voted in favour of a strike to get the living wage policy back. TSSU shared on Twitter that they will refuse to work overtime, talk in tutorials to inform students about collective arguments, put stickers on papers saying, “marked by a member”, and withhold grades.
In the same month that the policy was discarded, Vancouver's mayor and councillors were subjected to a 7.3 per cent raise. As a result of the raise, Vancouver's 10 councillors will earn $98,585, which excludes expense allowances and compensation from Metro Vancouver. The mayor’s pay will be $199,143 this year compared to $185,594 last year.
Former Vancouver councillor Jean Swanson finds it “disgusting” for a council to accept a pay raise while taking away wages for low-income people.
“They could have voted to reduce it, which we voted to do during COVID,” Swanson told The Vancouver Sun. Swanson stated she gave away tens of thousands of dollars of her salary each year on the council between 2018 and 2022.