A Tim Hortons franchise owner who slashed employee benefits within days of a province-wide minimum wage hike should take his business issues up with government rather than “bully” employees, says Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Jeri Horton-Joyce and Ron Joyce Jr. — owners of two Tim Hortons franchises in Cobourg, Ont., who are the children of the chain’s billionaire founders — penned a letter to their employees in December outlining changes to their operations they said were due to the Jan. 1 minimum wage increase to $14 per hour. The changes included eliminating paid breaks and requiring employees to pay a portion of their dental and health benefits.

While none of the changes outlined in the letter contravene the Employment Standards Act, the premier made it clear she disapproves of the employers’ tactics.

“If Mr. Joyce wants to pick a fight, I urge him to pick it with me and not those working the pick-up window and service counter of his stores,” she said in a statement.

“Asking minimum wage workers to sign a pledge acknowledging that their breaks will now go unpaid or agreeing to only receive eight hours’ pay for a nine-hour day is not decent and it’s not fair. It is the act of a bully.”

Wynne said she hopes Joyce will “choose to reverse his approach.”

The Star’s attempts to reach Joyce were unsuccessful. Jeri Horton-Joyce is the daughter of Hall of Fame hockey player Tim Horton, who opened the first Tim Hortons in Hamilton in 1964. Her husband Ron Joyce Jr. is the son of company co-founder Ron Joyce.

Restaurant Brands International, the company that bought the Tim Hortons chain for $12.5 billion (Canadian) in 2014, did not respond to the Star’s requests for comment.

The minimum wage, which increased from $11.60 to $14 an hour this week and will rise to $15 next year, has become the flashpoint in a broader conversation on job insecurity and precarious work.

“There will be businesses that face real challenges, that do have those tight margins,” said economist Michal Rozworski. “But for some of these big businesses, it’s pretty transparent it’s a scare tactic.”

An advocacy group for Tim Hortons franchises, the Great White North Franchisee Association, said franchise owners are left with few options in the face of the minimum wage hike, and a parent company that refuses to increase prices.

In a statement issued Thursday evening, the association defended the planned changes at the Cobourg franchises as having “been legally done to help them (the owners) cope with the added business pressures the impact of Bill 148 (The Liberal government’s Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act) has placed upon their establishments.”

Employer associations have consistently warned that the government’s two-year labour-law review, which culminated in sweeping updates to workplace standards, could result in job losses and increased consumer prices.

In its submission to the so-called Changing Workplaces Review, the employer-side Keep Ontario Working coalition warned that regulatory updates could “make it more difficult for Ontario business to grow and create good jobs.”

“Politics cannot drive decision-making. Evidence must,” the submission says.

To Deena Ladd of the Toronto-based Workers’ Action Centre, backlash against reforms aimed at tackling precarious work have little to do with evidence.

“I think we have seen this smoke and mirror game played by the corporate lobby groups,” she said. “The business lobby groups have tremendous power compared to non-unionized workers.”

Through a Freedom of Information request, the Star obtained an internal review of the Keep Ontario Working submission. The review provided to two independent, government-appointed special advisers was conducted in October 2016 by University of Toronto professor and Royal Society of Canada fellow Morley Gunderson. It says while the evidence submitted by the employer lobby group constituted “reasonable” advocacy, some of its economic claims “do not seem to be supported by the data.”

These include Keep Ontario Working’s contention that job tenure is increasing and that “in no time in Ontario’s history have employees in this province enjoyed such stable employment.” This trend, Gunderson notes, is reflective of an aging workforce and women staying in the labour force longer — rather than job stability.

“For young workers, expectations of long-tenured jobs are remote,” he says.

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“The current situation is one more of stagnant wages … and growing polarization between good and bad jobs. The polarization issue seems to receive little attention in their report,” Gunderson’s review adds.

As for the lobby group’s call for more evidence to back up reforms, Gunderson remarks that he is “all in favour of full-employment make-work projects for researchers like myself.”

“But cynics would say that many of these are simply stalling procedures to stall the implementation process.”

In recent years, several jurisdictions including San Francisco, Seattle and Alberta have committed to minimum wage raises, driven in part by momentum generated by the so-called Fight for $15 movement which advocates for low-wage workers.

Analysis by the U.S.-based National Employment Law Project — which examined 22 federal minimum wage hikes between 1938 and 2009 — found no correlation between those increases and lower employment levels. In fact, the analysis found that in 68 per cent of cases, overall employment went up after a federal wage increase.

Research released last year from the University of Washington suggests Seattle’s wage hike has resulted in large job losses, with working hours in low-wage jobs down by 9 per cent, which translated into $125 less a month in take-home earnings for workers. The report was criticized for excluding data from some 40 per cent of the city’s workforce.

“There is a way of parsing this debate. Yes, there are studies with a range of outcomes,” Rozworski said. “But it really does come down to the fact that over the past 20 years, (the research) really does show these small, negligible to statistically insignificant employment impacts.”

“Academic debate has always been around employment because it’s an easily measurable thing,” he added. “The chamber of commerce, the banks, are happy to have the debate driven that way because they don’t want their labour costs to go up.”

But business costs, Rozworksi said, are driven by a multitude of factors — not just wages.

“Commercial rents have gone up a huge amount in Toronto but you don’t see employers writing to employees saying ‘we’re going to cut your breaks.’”

Some 53 Canadian economists have endorsed the Ontario government’s minimum wage hike, noting that when adjusted for inflation the province’s previous rate — $11.40 an hour — is barely $1 higher than its value in 1977.

“We’re talking about people, so labour (costs) are not like other commodoties,” Rozworksi said. “Because we are talking about actual human beings.”

Sara Mojtehedzadeh can be reached at smojtehedzadeh@thestar.ca or 416-869-4195.

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