Even though the ongoing strike by Halifax’s librarians might indicate otherwise, the city of Halifax is supposed to be a great place to work. The HRM’s bureaucracy frequently wins awards as one of Canada’s top 100 employers. One of the big reasons Halifax wins so much is that the HRM is an employer that embodies its values by implementing plans and policies to ensure people paid with municipal tax dollars are being paid a living wage. This is why the HRM has implemented something called “social procurement.”
This program, approved by Halifax Regional Council in 2022, ensures that any private company awarded a contract over $1.5 million must pay its employees a living wage. One of the concerns of the social procurement program is that increasing the cost of labour will also increase government spending. But according to the city of Halifax, this is good because:
Best value for taxpayer dollars, including social value, is an investment in our communities and economy. It increases economic opportunities and independence that support full participation while advancing reconciliation, equity, inclusion diversity and well-being in our community. The multiplier effects of economic participation in the community can outweigh any perceived financial impact to the municipality and in practice has been shown to result in overall savings across focus areas therefore allowing the municipality to assign resources to areas of need.
Municipal employees were the notable exception to HRM’s living wage policy. Councillors like Lindell Smith have been pushing for years to try to get HRM’s employees paid a living wage. That’s why councillors requested a staff report on the living wage policy in March 2022, tasking staff to figure out a way of…
Ensuring a living wage for all employees of Halifax Regional Municipality, Halifax Public Libraries, as well as employees of the Multi-District Facilities, regardless of employment status (i.e., covering part-time, casual, seasonal, etc.) to be implemented no later than April 1, 2024. This report should be completed in time to inform the 2024-25 budget process.
In the legislative mechanics of Halifax’s municipal government, everything anyone elected to council wants to get done is achieved by directing the Chief Administrative Officer to write a staff report. Councillors who spoke to the Coast about this policy all believed that the vote in 2022 had instructed staff to start doing *something* to implement a living wage policy in the HRM, even if it was just another report.
However, staff considered their work done after submitting the living wage report as a memo in 2023. In an email to the Coast, a city spokesperson clarified that staff were only instructed to write a report about the fiscal implications of implementing a living wage policy. There are no plans to actually implement a living wage policy because “Regional Council requested a staff report outlining the financial impact of ensuring a living wage for all employees. Information reports are not voted on. Council provided no further direction on this topic.”
The upshot is that Halifax currently has no living wage policy for its employees, nor does it have plans to implement one.
The Value of a Living Wage
One of the core issues that has brought Halifax’s librarians to the picket line is that they have not been offered a living wage as part of the ongoing negotiation process. To add insult to injury, some people who work in libraries are paid a living wage. The private contractors who clean the library earn a living wage due to the HRM’s social procurement policy. In the age of COVID, as libraries continue to make up an increasing share of Halifax’s tattered social safety net, cleaning libraries is vital work that warrants a living wage. But in very real terms it sends a message loud and clear to the city’s librarians: They are not valued as highly as privately contracted janitors.
This is something the union representing the striking librarians highlighted in a recent update about the negotiations. Unlike the city’s privately contracted workers, the lowest tier of library employees, service support workers, are being offered a pay cut. The best offer so far for the service support workers is that by the year 2027, those workers will be making somewhere between $24.14 and $27.40 an hour. The only problem with that is according to the latest Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report released on Aug. 28, the living wage for 2024 in Halifax is now $28.30 an hour, up from $26.50 an hour in 2023. If service support workers were to accept the latest offer, by the year 2027 they will be facing the same issue that forced them to the picket line today: Wages that keep them in poverty.
By offering employees pay cuts disguised as raises and wages that aren’t keeping up with the cost of living, the city is shooting itself in the foot. One of the reasons the city is often unwilling to increase wages is that labour is one of the highest costs to the HRM’s budget, never mind the city’s talk that “economic participation in the community can outweigh any perceived financial impact to the municipality and in practice has been shown to result in overall savings.” This—combined with other issues like politicians artificially restricting municipal revenues by keeping taxes low; refusing to charge high fees for high-cost services like parking; and building out a municipality designed to bankrupt itself—makes it even more difficult to increase wages.
Governments, like the provincial government, don’t fix these structural issues and instead use them as an excuse to say there is no money to pay people higher wages. Last year, premier Tim Houston’s Tories said there was no money for school support workers; this year, they’re saying there’s no money for healthcare support workers. But the reality is not paying support workers a living wage always costs more and hurts governmental budgets in the long term. Governments might save some money in the short term but as the new Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report reads, “budgets are impacted by the high cost of poverty, whether by productivity loss or by the pressures on its budget to help people manage to live on a low income.”
What this means in practice is that when Halifax’s police officers say they need more people to deal with the rising levels of crime associated with the rising levels of poverty, the city splashes out the cash, agreeing to pay $6 million more a year for 22 new HRP police officers and $1.1 million for six new RCMP officers. In total, the city is shelling out $7.1 million more annually for 28 new cops. Figures in the living wage staff report from 2023 say that bringing all HRM employees up to a living wage would have cost about $7.5 million annually.
According to Britt Wilson, the HRM’s executive director of human resources, one of the things that makes Halifax such a great place to work is something called the “Plan on the Page.” This plan allows the HRM to live its values of “accountability, diversity, inclusion and respect in the workplace.” In an interview with Mediacorp about why Halifax is such a good employer, Wilson explains: "We always make sure when we make decisions–whether it’s HR or finance or communications–that the decision reflects back on our values and missions.”
If that is true, then the message to Halifax’s librarians could not be more clear. The city of Halifax makes decisions that reflect its values. Therefore the decision to offer poverty wages to employees was made because librarians are people the city does not value.