[van-announce] Fight Campbell's Training Wage! Public Meeting

[Mike Krebs]

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Fight Campbell’s Training Wage

To Whom It May Concern:

This is a letter from the Anti-Poverty Committee inviting your organization 
to endorse our demand to end the $6 training wage, and attend our upcoming 
‘Fight Campbell’s Training Wage’ Campaign meeting. This meeting is happening 
Monday, September 16th, at 6 PM. It will be held at the SFU Harbour Centre, 
located at 515 West Hastings Street (downtown Vancouver).
When the training wage was first introduced in November, we knew that this 
was not really a 'training wage' at all, but simply a new $6 minimum wage. 
Now, less than a year since it first came into effect, the obvious has been 
proven. Aside from its legal use, which is itself an unnacceptable attack on 
young workers, we have seen numerous cases where people who should be 
'exempt' from the legislation are being hurt by the training wage. Some 
examples are:

1.	Workers are being told that because they don't have experience in a 
particular industry, they would have to work for $6 an hour (in one case, 
the employer said that the worker didn’t have experience in a ‘pizza’ 
restaurant, despite having worked at many other restaurants).
2.	Workers already employed at $8 and hour or higher are fired without cause 
and then replaced by new workers at $6 an hour.
3.	In one situation, a worker who recently immigrated to Canada was told by 
their new boss that they wouldn't be paid $6 if they agreed to work for one 
week for free.

All of these situations are illegal. They are also proof that the training 
wage was designed as an attack on all workers, despite claims that only 
people without previous experience would be affected. But the training wage 
was designed to be abused. Very little information is available about when 
an employer can and can't use the training wage, so in many cases people 
don’t even know that they are being illegally paid the training wage. This 
attack was made even worse by changes to the Employment Standards Act, where 
one has to fill out a 'Self-Help Kit’ and try to resolve the issue they have 
with their boss before Employment Standards will even consider their claim. 
This is like giving a letter to somebody who robs you asking for your things 
back. Even when people know for sure that they are being paid the training 
wage illegally, there is little that they can do about it on their own. The 
'proper channels' provide next to nothing for exploited workers, and are not 
really designed to be used in the first place.
Combined with other cutbacks, the impact of the training wage on poor people 
becomes even more devastating. The cuts to childcare subsidies and other 
welfare benefits is forcing single parents to find work that clearly isn’t 
there. Now, entering the labour market at $6 an hour, parents will not be 
able to pay someone else $8 an hour for childcare. This is a gross attack on 
parents and their children.
We, the Anti-Poverty Committee, are asking your organization to endorse our 
demand to end the training wage, and we encourage you to attend this meeting 
and/or provide material support for this intitative. Our expenses/resource 
needs for these actions include:
·	Transportation (bus tickets for people traveling to the meeting)
·	Promotional materials (poster/leaflet production, photocopying, etc.)
·	Money to pay for childcare
Please feel free to contact the Anti-Poverty Committee if you have any 
questions. We can be reached by phone at (604) 682-2726, or by sending an 
email to apc at resist.ca.

In Solidarity,


Mike Krebs
Steering Committee member, Anti-Poverty Committee




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