I was just reading a newspaper article online that was originally published in the Victoria Times Colonist which was written to emphasize how a self-employed business owner generally enjoys their work life a lot more compared to someone who is employed by a company. The interesting note was how it was mentioned that statistically on average an entrepreneur makes less than a paid employee. According to the article, in the year 2004 a self-employed individual works about 56 hours per week on average while earning about $38,000 per year. In contrast, the average working hours for a paid employee was about 39 hours per week with an earning average of about $5000 more than a self-employed individual. For those who are interested, these statistics came from a report entitled “For Love or Money. A Study of Entrepreneurship in Canada”.

While the average earnings in this report for a self-employed person was a little surprising to me, I suppose it makes sense as you have to factor in all the expenses involved in running a business which varies depending on the nature of your company and industry. As mentioned in this article though, for most people who start their own business it comes down to lifestyle. If you’re doing what you love then you will be motivated to be the best for yourself and the business everyday. Almost everyone that I have met who has started a particular business solely based on the fact that it had incredible income potential regardless of whether or not they felt good about it ended up dissatisfied about their lifestyle. I’m sure everyone has read stories about people starting a business based on a certain passion that they had which turned out to be very successful and hence created themselves a very profitable company. I personally think that is the best way to go as I believe regardless if someone has chosen the self-employed path or opted to work for a company, one should be working towards making their lives richer rather than to solely make their wallets bigger.

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The teacher strike here in BC has recently started and it sure is loud and chaotic in certain high traffic areas here. For those who are not entirely aware of this labor strike, one of the reasons why it is a little more controversial than a typical strike is that recently a law was passed here which made education an essential service and therefore technically teachers that are protesting are breaking the law as it is an illegal strike. Union leaders are saying that it is simply “civil disobedience” as it needs to be done to do what’s right. I’ve been watching the news, reading debates online and talking to others about how they felt about the situation and as expected there are a lot of mixed opinion.

Most of my conversations ended up on just how much teachers make and whether or not it was a livable/fair income. Based on the data provided on the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation site, a top earner averages about $63,737 per year and about $42,707 for starters. Every industry and profession is obviously different, but just for reference the minimum wage right now is $8 an hour or $16640 at 40 hours per week a year. Because of those figures, I’m personally leaning towards the side saying that a teacher’s salary is perfectly livable. If a person is complaining that it is not enough in regards to being able to live and pay off finances, I would think that the person just simply has a hard time managing their money in general. To me, it’s just another example of people assuming that the only way to solve their financial situations is to simply make more money.

Another reason that was brought up for striking is that teachers are demanding that issues such as classrooms with 30+ students should be reduced and how currently these students will also consist of ones who require special needs which make it difficult for them to provide the best for each student. Now these are the type of issues that myself and the rest of the people I talked with were more inclined to agree with as conditions that should be addressed. If the protest was based solely on issues like that, then I would personally be more inclined to agree with the teachers. In my opinion, you choose a profession with a general expectation on how much you’ll earn and what type of conditions you will have to go through. As an over exaggerated example, I’m sure an actor would love to make an extra million in doing a certain film, but if he starts to say that he should earn an extra million because he has too many lines to memorize, I personally wouldn’t be very supportive of that.

This issue is probably going to drag along for awhile, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

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