If you're an employer in Canada, you just get together with your buddies, call up your local government official and "convince" him to launch a program where hundreds of thousands of minimum wage "Temporary" Foreign Workers (TFW's) are imported to fill the gap.

And if you're a jealous high employer of skilled personnel, you just do the same, and legislation has just recently been passed so skilled workers can now be imported just like TFW's.

Now, there will never be full employment across most of the job spectrum so salaries will never have to rise. Add in a top 3 in the world unaffordable housing market, and this is how you eliminate a middle class.

I did find it odd we have an entire article on wages and no mention of immigration. People, particularly on the low end, are not going to get raises if you import new workers faster than the economy can absorb them.

Well it is a fantastically controversial one so it's probably deliberately left out.

On a similar topic it irks me that in one breath people will talk of the power of future automation and in another support large scale migration.

Automation reduces demand for labour and its price falls.

In Canada the narrative is that increased population is "needed" to support social services, but inconvenient facts like certain classes of immigrants, who happen to be one of the largest demographics, pay no taxes when they arrive is not considered relevant to the discussion.

Managing future budgets is claimed to be the motivation for the immigration increase, but does not stand up to scrutiny, and the government is not open to questions on the subject as it would constitute hate speech.

Its the same in Australia

Helicopter families? Wife and kids get citizenship for free school/medical/dental/welfare and tax free capital gains on the house, husband doesn't get citizenship so doesn't have to pay Aus tax or even declare overseas income, and just wires $ for groceries and Mercedes?

Do you also have huge neighborhoods of million dollar houses and hundreds of thousands of dollars of cars in the driveway, but there's no tax base because everyone's income is below the poverty level?

>Do you also have huge neighborhoods of million dollar houses and hundreds of thousands of dollars of cars in the driveway, but there's no tax base because everyone's income is below the poverty level?

Wait, how does that work? I'm obviously doing something wrong...

It's the same issue as in the car market. The advertized numbers are wishful thinking. The final price on the deal is almost always better. But you don't see those numbers advertized, because those open positions/cars will be spotted quickly and thus the offer will be filled quickly. "Market rate" is a concept that only works when their is open outcry, meaning that offers and agreed deals are visible to other market participants.

The flip side of market rate is what employers can afford to pay while staying solvent. We are in the midst of a huge technology disruption affecting all aspects of retail and manufacturing.

What happens to the mom and pop coffee shop or the grocery store that charges more than Amazon Fresh?

Enployment has a bid and offer, both sides are reluctant to cross without desperation.

>What happens to the mom and pop coffee shop or the grocery store that charges more than Amazon Fresh?

Nothing. Amazon Fresh doesn't exist in most places.

>What happens to the mom and pop coffee shop or the grocery store that charges more than Amazon Fresh?

Coffee shops aren't known for being places to get cheap groceries; they're places where you get fancy drinks and/or snacks and hang out and talk to your friends or use the WiFi. In other words, coffee shops are selling an experience, not a fungible good.

If a coffee shop goes out of business because of an online seller, they must have been offering a really lousy experience.

>I will sometimes counter with "if you're offering a rate and no one is taking you up on it, by definition, that's not the market rate"

And what do they say to that? Blank stares? Acting like you're crazy? When I say stuff like that on boards like this, I usually have people arguing with me that no, there really is a "shortage" of workers.