Canadian Personal Finance Blog

The French President Nicolas Sarkozy is asking that very question. How can the economic measures done include the relative happiness of the populous in the economic growth ?

Interesting question but who cares? If there is economic growth the relative happiness of any single worker has very little to do with any of this, that is the nature of the free market system. I am not saying that employers and governments should not care about happiness of workers in their companies or their countries, what I am saying, is: They don’t. The only time the relative happiness of employees or workers ever comes into play is when there is a scarcity of those employees and then the Employers must then make sure their employees are happy (to retain them).

Case in Point

Over my thirty years working various jobs my best examples of what makes people happy is simply whether they get good pay raises,whether their direct boss or the people they work with are good to work with, and whether they enjoy their direct job. I have been lucky in that most of my bosses have been reasonable folk and the folk I work with the same, so my only “happiness” monitor was and is money.

How do I make more money? I really don’t know. Years when I think I have been effective, I have had little or no pay raise, years where I feel I have failed I have been rewarded highly (and vice versa). If someone could train me in how to increase my Happiness by increasing my income, I’d be even happier. If anyone cares to comment on getting a raise, I am interested in hearing your Happiness and Pay Raise stories.

Anecdote

Two years in a row I went into my “pay adjustment” discussions with my boss expecting raises and both times I got not much:

• The first year my company had not done very well and the stock had dropped a fair amount and the statement I got from my boss at the time was, “How can you expect a raise look at the stock price?“
• The next year, the same boss and I went into our adjust meeting, the stock had rebounded the company was doing much better and when I asked about why my raise was about the same as the previous lean year, given the stock price had rebounded, I got the statement, “The Stock Price, has nothing to do with your relative pay raise“.

Bosses say the darndest things don’t they?

Yes, the Ontario Provincial Budget is due out tomorrow, and this one should be interesting since it is the last budget before the upcoming provincial election this fall. Can I find much analysis or guesswork out there about what might be included? Not much really, I found Mr. McGuinty’s response to the Federal Budget on the Provincial Liberal’s web site but not much else right now.

I have heard talk that there is a plan to raise the minimum wage in Ontario to around $10 an hour, but that is only planned to be phased in over the next three years or so, currently it is around $8/hour. So someone working the minimum wage for a 42 hour work week is going to gross about $340.00, a week, doesn’t seem like enough to live on to me.

There are comments about post secondary funding I have heard, but nothing concrete mentioned as of yet. There will need to be closure on any election promises from 4 years ago, but then again, I don’t remember much of those either.

This seems to be almost a Stealth Budget about to be brought down by Queens Park. The Liberals hope you don’t read it, or even think about it? That’s a little cynical, I guess, but still, no one seems to care about it.