CALGARY—On a grey and rainy Thursday, the week before Alberta’s latest minimum wage increase, Noble Solomon took a drag on his cigarette behind Saltlik.

The steak house in Calgary’s downtown would be required to give its minimum wage employees a $1.40 per hour raise the following Monday. But Solomon, a line cook, already earned $15 an hour thanks to his experience, meaning he’d be soon be earning the same wage as new kitchen hires or servers — both of whom earned minimum wage.

“We’re not going to get a raise,” he said. “If I’m making, say, three dollars more than minimum wage right now, they’re not going to bump me up three dollars more, right?”

However, economic data suggests that workers like Solomon may in fact end up with a slight raise.

Trevor Tombe, an associate professor in the University of Calgary’s department of economics, said data from Alberta’s minimum-wage increase Oct. 1, 2017 — from $12.20 to $13.60 an hour, affecting 300,000 Albertans in minimum-wage jobs — showed a small but noticeable increase in the number of workers earning about a dollar above the new minimum.

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“It can be fairly modest, but after that, you don’t see much of a change in the number of people earning those wage categories,” Tombe said.

Workers with experience or those in floor-level management roles, such as shift supervisors at a coffee shop, are those likely to see a slight increase, but Tombe said it’s impossible to say how many of these workers will end up with a little extra money in their pocket.

“Even if some do not have a codified contract, they may go to their employer and say: I want another 25 cents,” Tombe said. “And the employer — if they’re a valued employee — may agree.”

A recently published study commissioned by the Alberta Federation of Labour and conducted by a retired Statistics Canada economist found some indications of a wage bump for those earning close to the new minimum wage, although the study’s author warned that the analysis is a broad overview. The study relied on historical data based on Alberta’s last minimum wage increase in Oct. 2017.

“What he found was that the increases helped exactly the wage cohort that they were intended to help, which is those earning wages very close to the minimum wage,” said AFL president Gil McGowan of the economists’ findings.

Labour-market data on the latest minimum-wage increase isn’t available yet, but Tombe said that, based on historical data, it could happen again.

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Noble Solomon, however, didn’t expect he’d see a wage bump.

“But (the) kitchen industry, that’s how it is,” he said. “We all signed up for this knowing this was going to happen.”

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