Assorted content to end your week. – Andrew Jackson thoroughly demolishes the argument that after three decades of wage stagnation and soaring corporate profits, Canada’s economy somehow needs to see workers suffer even more: The reality is that the pay of most workers has stagnated in real terms over the
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Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Sum Of Us deserves plenty of credit for highlighting Enbridge’s attempt to delete a thousand square kilometers of treacherous and sensitive islands in order to sugar-coat the dangers of shipping oil out of Kitimat. But it’s also worth noting that the issue
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Carol Goar comments on the CEP/CAW plan to merge and work toward a far more active type of unionism: Both the CAW and the CEP — of which I am a member — gobbled up smaller unions to reach their current size.
Continue readingCanadian Progressive World: Canada lost 30 400 jobs in July & apologists blame the global economy
This is the kind of news Stephen Harper and the Conservatives would wish you didn’t hear. That’s because it debunks the self-made myth that they’re competent economic managers. They want us to believe that Canada survived the recent global recession better than most countries because of them. And, they’re rapidly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – John Conway discusses the Cons’ project of destroying Canada’s social safety net. – But the good news is that Stephen Harper is running into a few roadblocks along the way. For example, the rule of law – as a Federal Court judge has
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for a sunny Sunday. – Mitchell Anderson’s second article on Norway’s success in converting oil resources into a massive source of public wealth focuses on the country’s history of resistance to outside ownership. But I wouldn’t see much reason why Canada couldn’t turn its own sense of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jonathan Chait points out how the gap between the citizens hardest hit by a weak economy and a political class which faces virtually none of its effects explains the lack of urgency in dealing with mass unemployment: The political scientist Larry Bartels has
Continue readingwmtc: marxism 2012 program notes: the 1965 postal workers strike
One of the best talks I attended at this year’s Marxism Conference was given by my friend Pam Johnson. I know little about Canadian labour history; my knowledge of labour struggles is mostly about the US. Learning about the 1965 postal workers strike was thrilling, both in the discovery of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Mitchell Anderson reports on how Norway has assured itself of long-term fiscal security by saving a fair share of its oil resources: Norway produces 40 per cent less petroleum than Canada and has one-seventh our population, but has saved more than $600
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – The presidents of Canada’s provincial Federations of Labour highlight how the provinces need to respond to the Harper Cons’ efforts to push down wages and trample on workers’ rightst: Canadians need our country’s premiers to denounce this low-wage agenda and stand up for
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Employment & Labour Legislation Submission
Plenty of others will be chiming in today on the future of employment and labour law in Saskatchewan; here’s my personal contribution. Many other voices have expressed concerns about the limited amount of actual consultation provided through the within process. My intention is not to merely echo those concerns (however
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – David Olive comments on the world food crisis, making the point that what we’re lacking is some link between more-than-sufficient productive capacity and the nutritional needs of less wealthy people around the globe: (A) permanently higher price for oil spurred successful innovation to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Frances Russell comments on how the Harper Cons are ready to impose exactly the kind of centralized and unresponsive decision-making they’ve long loathed – but only when it comes to favouring Alberta’s interests over B.C.’s real environmental concerns. But Michael Harris notes that
Continue readingAlberta Diary: Some Alberta seniors will soon be eating better meals – they can thank the union for them
AUPE’s powerful viral video on the unappetizing 21-day menu. Below: Former Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett, Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne. One of the least successful experiments of the short, unhappy reign of Stephen Duckett as CEO of Alberta Health Services was the so-called 21-day menu, the unpalatable tinfoil-
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – The Guardian reports on the Tax Justice Network’s study on offshoring which finds tens of trillions of dollars to have been funneled to tax havens: Using the BIS’s measure of “offshore deposits” – cash held outside the depositor’s home country – and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Doug Saunders discusses how corporate cash hoarding is limiting any economic recovery – and what we can do about it: (T)his should be a great time for companies to invest: low prices, low interest rates, cheaper labour costs. A sensible company would build
Continue readingwmtc: rtod: a town without poverty. it happened in canada.
Revolutionary thought of the day: Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work. It turns out they did. Only two
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Sid Ryan takes on the Harper/Hudak double-team effort to prevent workers from having any voice in our political direction: (T)here can be little doubt that what really offends Hudak is the fact that union members pool their resources to participate in municipal, provincial
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Michael Harris continues to highlight some of the fundamental problems with the Cons’ view of politics, this time identifying Stephen Harper as being afflicted with “master of the universe syndrome”: When you control all the levers of power, when you have no scruples,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Dave Coles writes that the Harper Cons are using their power to protect the privacy of international arms dealers, while at the same time demanding stringent reporting requirements for labour unions and their members: Labour unions are among the few institutions that
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