Kinew promises $15 minimum wage by 2024
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/05/2017 (2154 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
An NDP government would increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by the time its first mandate ends in 2024, leadership candidate Wab Kinew promised Thursday.
“No one working in Manitoba full time should have to live in poverty,” Kinew told a news conference. “We’re going to set a bold target.”
It was the first policy announcement for the rookie Fort Rouge MLA, currently the only candidate in the Sept. 16 leadership race.
Minimum wage is $11 an hour, and the provincial Conservative government has resisted a year of demands from the NDP opposition to raise the figure.
“We’ve asked him to raise it by any measure. Hopefully, we won’t be starting at $11 an hour,” said Kinew about the minimum wage level in 2020, when he hopes to become premier.
An NDP government would phase-in the increases, and there would be some form of assistance for small employers such as “a hipster coffee shop, a mom and pop store,” he said.
Kinew said the NDP had raised the minimum wage from $6 an hour in 1999 to $11 an hour by the April 2016 election.
Kinew stood in front of three supporters at the Social Enterprise Centre on Main Street, while two campaign team members filmed his news conference, attended by one reporter.
nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
