Living Wage Employer

Effective January 1st, 2011, the City of New Westminster became a “Living Wage Employer” – the first City in Canada to do so. As such, the City has established a Living Wage Policy that requires all firms that are contracted directly or subcontracted by the City to provide services on City premises to pay their employees who perform the services a Living Wage as calculated by the Living Wage for Families Campaign. The current living wage rate for Metro Vancouver is $25.68 per hour, assuming the employer provides no benefits.

In order to determine an employee’s hourly rate with benefits the Living Wage for Families Campaign has provided a Living Wage Calculator to assist with this determination.

The City has included in all its competitive bid documents a Declaration and a clause referencing the City’s expectations with regards to compliance of the Policy. Completion and submission of the Declaration before an award is mandatory.

  • The City has established the following criteria to determine a service provider’s or sub-contractor’s eligibility under the Living Wage Policy.

    • An employee of a service provider or of its sub-contractor must perform services physically on City premises.
    • Work must last longer than one continuous hour per occasion.

     

  • The City will enforce the Policy by performing audits of its Service Providers and Sub-contractors when notification of non-compliance is received by the City. These audits may take the form of a review of paystubs issued by the vendor under review or any other means pertinent to arriving at a determination.

     

  • Please direct all notifications of possible non-compliance to the Purchasing Division by letter, fax, or e-mail ().

    The following details should be provided:

    • The name of the service provider or sub-contractor
    • The date, time, and location where the service provider or sub-contractor was working
    • The type of work that the employee was performing
    • Your name and contact information

    All notifications to Purchasing will be held confidential.  Purchasing will not accept anonymous notifications.

    Upon receiving the notification, Purchasing will perform an audit of the service provider or sub-contractor.  These audits may take the form of a review of paystubs issued by the vendor under review or any other means pertinent to arriving at a determination.

     

  • The service provider and/or sub-contractors will be required to compensate for any shortfall in pay to the affected employees at no extra cost to the City. Non-compliance may result in the cancellation of the Contract at the discretion of the City.