Assorted content for your weekend reading. – David MacDonald studies the federal government’s loopholes and giveaways targeted toward those who already have the most – noting that there would be plenty of revenue to fund the programs we’re told are unaffordable if that preferential treatment was ended. And Felicity Lawrence
Continue readingTag: labour.
Canadian Dimension: Fifteen plus: the minimum wage & austerity in Québec
Photo by Michel Giroux In April 2012, during the height of Québec’s Maple Spring, one of the key leaders of the student movement, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, said the hope was for that movement to be a “trampoline.” The “Red Square” movement gave voice to widespread popular opposition to austerity in Québec
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Paul Krugman criticizes the use of non-compete agreements to trap workers at low wage levels with no opportunity to pursue comparable employment – as well as the Republicans’ insistence on pushing employer-based health care which further limits workers’ options: At this point, in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Josh Bivens notes that U.S. corporations are already paying a lower share of taxes than has historically been the case – meaning that there’s no air of reality to the claim that handing them more money will produce any positive economic results.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Maureen Conway and Mark Popovich argue that something has gone severely wrong if (as seems to be the case) Wall Street is treating higher wages as bad news: In 2017, America has a jobs problem: It’s not that we don’t have enough jobs,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Binyamin Appelbaum highlights the strong consensus view that Donald Trump’s planned tax giveaways to the rich will do nothing for overall economic development. And John Buell points out that Trump’s plan for privatized infrastructure – much like Justin Trudeau’s – will serve only
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Claire Provost writes about the spread of the private security industry – which now exceeds the size of public police forces in Canada among other countries – as a means of privileging the protection of wealth over public interests. – Meanwhile, Lana Payne
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Nick Falvo lists ten things to know about social programs in Canada. And Mike Crawley offers a painful example of Ontario’s social safety net and employment law both falling short, as injured workers are forced to go to work even when ill or
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Dean Baker notes that a reduction in required work time could go a long way toward ensuring that workers share in productivity gains. – Meanwhile, Max Ehrenfreund writes about new research on the state of the U.S.’ middle class – showing that lifetime
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Unions are critical in youth fight against precarity
Photo from RankandFile.ca “It is the instability, not knowing how many hours I would get in a week,” says Samuelm, who’s quoted in a 2015 report by the Workers’ Action Centre entitled Still Working on the Edge: Building Decent Jobs from the Ground Up. “Wages are low…. We get about
Continue readingJoe Fantauzzi: Desmond Cole, the Toronto Star and Another Existential Crisis for Professional Journalism
DISCLOSURE: I worked as a mainstream news reporter between 2003 and 2012. I see this as a two-fold issue; firstly, actions and secondly, words. I’ll consider both briefly and then elaborate on my concerns. Actions There is no point in rehashing here the now well-known details of what lead to Desmond
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Branko Milanovic reviews Mike Lofgren’s The Deep State, and highlights how entrenched wealth and power have hijacked our public institutions for their own benefit: The deep state includes the old-fashioned military-industrial complex, top of Wall Street and Silicon valley, think tanks and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Clive Hamilton discusses the accelerating calamity of climate change which we’re allowing to happen: Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival. Yet in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – James Wilt argues that the labour movement should be putting its weight behind green housing which will produce both social and environmental benefits along with jobs: Workers need affordable homes. Workers also need stable and properly compensated jobs, especially those transitioning from
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Shortchanged in the restaurant kitchen
Photo by Life & Thyme in Los Angeles In November 2016, the Guardian newspaper reported that Le Gavroche, the three-star Michelin restaurant of famed English chef Michael Roux Jr., was paying some of its cooks as little as £5.50 per hour (C$9.16), well below Britain’s £7.20 (C$11.98) legal minimum for
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Would a maximum wage law work for Canada?
Illustration by Notable.ca The idea of a maximum wage is the logical counterpart of a minimum wage in ameliorating extremes in market outcomes. With the global equality gap rupturing societies almost everywhere, it is a sane suggestion to find ways to help rein in the super-rich. Traditional societies used everything
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Evening Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Trade Justice reports on Justin Trudeau’s role in pushing for an international corporate giveaway through a new Trans-Pacific Partnership – even as the country whose capital class largely shaped it before has no interest in participating. And James Munson reports that Justin
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Paul Campos compares the U.S.’ hourly wages to its GDP over the past few decades to show how workers have been left out of any economic growth. And Arindrajit Dube examines the effect of an increased minimum wage, and finds a direct impact
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Tim Bousquet writes that the push toward “social entrepreneurship” ultimately serves to undermine the importance of the public good: My real worry here is that the phrase “social enterprise” is the softer, feel-good end of the push for increased entrepreneurship, which is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Christian Cooper discusses how poverty is like a disease in its effect on a person’s mental and physical well-being. And Andre Picard highlights the reality that in order to address the damage done by centuries of systematic discrimination against Canada’s indigenous people, we
Continue reading