This week’s podcast focuses on two numbers, one million and fourteen, that draw out some interesting links between economics and politics in Ontario and beyond. https://politicalehconomy.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/podcast-140606-ontario.mp3 One million is the number of jobs that Tim Hudak has promised to create in Ontario if elected next week. This one million claim has
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Canadian Dimension | Articles: The Temporary Foreign Worker Program and labour solidarity
The context of migration not only makes it easier for employers to exploit TFWs, it also serves to obscure the common core of labour solidarity that should be at the basis of responses to the greater labour discipline that the TFWP enables. The expansion of the TFWP and its increasing
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Pension trade-offs and democratic deficits
Forget houses as a source of secondary income – that’s so 2007. After the latest recession, Americans are increasingly dipping into their retirement savings to fund on-going consumer expenses. Many private 401(k) plans have rules that allow workers to withdraw some amount of saved funds before retirement and such early
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Political Eh-conomy Radio: Linda McQuaig on Hudak’s imaginary jobs and Canadian inequality
Today, I’m happy to present another extended interview and my guest is Linda McQuaig. Linda is a National Newspaper Award-winning journalist and commentator who has worked for the Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star and many other outlets. She is also a best-selling author of numerous books that have focused on
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Forget global superstar, Vancouver’s housing troubles start at home
Vancouver was the star of a recent New Yorker article that shone a light on the city’s lack of housing affordability and linked this lack to an inflow of foreign buyers. Unfortunately, this link is extremely tenuous, as most of the support is anecdotal or based on very limited data.
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Hudak’s plans to cut teachers in statistics and politics
It’s election time in Ontario and that means graphs and statistics, facts and factoids, some stale, some new come out of the woodwork. Take the tweet below as an example, one that riffs on the old theme of an exploding public sector encapsulated in Tim Hudak’s promise to cut 100,000
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Political Eh-conomy Radio: CLC Convention 2014
This week’s convention of the Canadian Labour Congress was more eventful than it has been in some time. There was a change of leadership and an energy palpable even from afar via social media. Of course, four days of convention does not a labour movement make and so today I’ve gathered
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: May (we struggle to work less during the) Day
The struggle for fewer working hours during the day, and by extension the week and the year, was long a cornerstone of organized workers. Both the struggle and the actual number of hours worked has stalled of late. Annual hours worked in Canada, the US and UK have all followed a similar pattern,
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Victim or menace: Notes on the TFWP and political agency
The louder the debate about temporary foreign workers grows, the more it seems temporary foreign workers, especially those from the global South performing low-wage labour, are left in the din on the sidelines. While there have been stories about exploitation on the job and beyond, much of the focus is
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Political Eh-conomy Radio: Temporary Foreign Workers
The Temporary Foreign Workers Program has been increasingly in the spotlight the last few weeks. Many allegations have surfaced about the appalling living and working conditions faced by migrant workers. While much of the media coverage has ignored what is most important, my two guests on this week’s podcast are ready to offer some
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: What’s the risk? Climate activism aiming at supply and demand
One way to think about climate activism is to see if it focuses on the supply of or demand for fossil fuels – pipelines or cars, hydrocarbons or carbon emissions. This distinction is not a new one, is doubtless very simplistic and has often been used to chastise activists. Here,
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: The Temporary Foreign Worker Program and labour solidarity
Yesterday, I took a look at the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and how it helps enforce labour discipline on all workers, and low-wage workers in particular. Today, I want to explore the migration side of the migrant worker equation. The context of migration not only makes it easier for
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: The Temporary Foreign Workers Program and labour market discipline
While it is a truism that migrant labour built Canada, this same migrant labour has long been used to discipline domestic workers. Both facts are imprinted into the history of Canada. Today is no different and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) is at the centre of debates about migrant
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Political Eh-conomy Radio: BC’s resource economy
Today’s focus is on British Columbia’s resource economy. Although I’ll be talking about British Columbia in particular, the same issues come up in various guises across North America wherever the large-scale extraction of natural resources is economically important. My two guests are Marc Lee, Senior Economist with the BC office
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Whose efficiency? what efficiency?
Efficiency is formidable. It rears its head most everywhere. Witness the tyranny of the target at more and more workplaces: from more greets per hour to more exam points per teacher. At the same time, efficiency also nurtures increasing tyrannies at home: get fit in 12 minutes per day instead
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Working class disarmed, Canadian redux
Looking at the prevalence of strikes in the US over the past six decades, Doug Henwood writes, Second Amendment fetishism aside, there’s an old saying that the working class’s ultimate weapon is withholding labor through slowdowns and strikes. By that measure, the U.S. working class has been effectively disarmed since
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Where’s the tax in BC’s carbon tax?
British Columbia’s carbon tax has been getting some high praise lately. A recent article in the Atlantic called it “the crown jewel of North American climate policy”. Such assessments need some tempering. BC’s carbon tax can tell us important things about the limits of fiscal policy today, which in turn
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Political Eh-conomy Radio: Questioning legacies: Flaherty and the PQ
This week’s podcast takes on government economic policy. First, Armine Yalnizyan looks back at the tenure of Jim Flaherty as federal Finance Minister; the interview is based on an article she recently published in the Globe and Mail. Armine is a senoir economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. She is also a
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Piketty on Canada: Oil and inequality
Alright, so the title is a bit of a cheap hook, taking advantage of the popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. In his book, French economist Piketty traces the contours of global inequalities of wealth (and income) over the past 300 years and wraps them in a
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Published elsewhere: Ontario is no California when it comes to debt
The Toronto Star just published an article I wrote in response to claims made by the Fraser Institute and the Toronto Sun that Ontario has a runaway debt problem worse than California’s. The short version: I call BS. The slightly longer version: California has constraints, such as limits on the
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