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By Greg Fingas, on April 29, 2013, at 9:45 am Assorted content to start your week.
- Lynn Stuart Parramore discusses the epidemic of wage theft by U.S. employers: Americans like to think that a fair day’s work brings a fair day’s pay. Cheating workers of their wages may seem like a problem of 19th-century sweatshops. But it’s back and taking a terrible toll. We’re talking billions of dollars in wages; millions of workers affected each year. A gigantic heist is being perpetrated against working people: they’re getting screwed on overtime, denied their tips, shortchanged on benefits, defrauded on payroll, and handed paychecks that bounce like rubber balls. A (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on February 15, 2013, at 9:03 am Assorted content for your Friday reading.
- Zoe Williams questions when being poor became grounds for deliberate discrimination and ritual public humiliation (h/t to Mound of Sound): What I cannot help noticing is a failure of normal human respect for the people at the bottom of the heap – Tuesday’s ruling in favour of Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson has had its bones picked over for what it does or doesn’t say about slavery, and yet the judges were clear: these people were treated dishonestly. They were treated as though, being unemployed, they could be parcelled about at the
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 30, 2013, at 12:26 pm Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Alison highlights the attempts of Sun TV to rally the most extreme reactionary movements in the country behind its bid for mandatory carriage. And the question of whether we want to publicly sanction a network beholden to such interest groups would seem to answer whether the application is justified.
- Paul Krugman comments that the Republicans’ attacks on disabled workers are both thoroughly contrary to any sense of fairness, and utterly useless in practice:
(W)hen Reagan ranted about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, he was inventing a fake problem — but his rant resonated
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on December 29, 2012, at 11:03 am Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Lana Payne discusses the contrast between Theresa Spence’s selfless efforts to improve the lives of First Nations citizens, and Stephen Harper’s callous indifference: Is a hunger strike the answer? I honestly do not know, but then I have not known Chief Spence’s anguish. After all, she says her act is not about “anger, it is about pain.”
But I do so worry about this brave woman who starves herself while waiting for a meeting with the prime minister. I worry because Stephen Harper is a very stubborn man.
And Chief Spence is
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on December 20, 2012, at 9:01 am Here, expanding on this post as to Simon Enoch’s study of corporate power in Saskatchewan – and suggesting that we use the networks mapped out by Enoch in analyzing the Saskatchewan Party’s corporatist policy choices.
Again, Enoch’s study is available here. And you’ll find some of my previous writing about Enterprise Saskatchewan and the Wall government’s corporatist inclinations here and here.
By Greg Fingas, on December 18, 2012, at 10:08 am Simon Enoch’s study mapping corporate power in Saskatchewan may be one of the most important pieces of research I’ve seen in quite some time – and I’ll highly encourage visitors to give it a thorough read. But I’ll quibble with one aspect of Enoch’s conclusion – he’s done more work to tie together multiple stands of corporate influence than his proposed policy prescription could possibly hope to accomplish.
After analyzing the board and executive structures of corporations, interest groups and government structures alike and demonstrating the striking correlation between them, Enoch’s headline takeaway is this: As record amounts of corporate
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On revealed connections
By Greg Fingas, on September 15, 2012, at 11:24 am Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Jon Wisman and Aaron Pacitti put a price tag on the upward redistribution of wealth in the U.S.: Between 1983 and 2007, total inflation-adjusted wealth in the U.S. increased by $27 trillion. If divided equally, every man woman and child would be almost $90,000 richer.
But of course it wasn’t divided equally. Almost half of the $27 trillion (49 percent) was claimed by the richest one percent — $11.7 million more for each of their households. The top 10 percent grabbed almost $29 trillion, or 106 percent of the
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on May 3, 2012, at 9:35 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- The Cons’ move to suppress Canadian wages by encouraging the use of disposable, temporary foreign labour is receiving plenty of due outcry. Here’s Armine Yalnizyan:
Disturbingly, the federal announcement also set out new wage rules that permit employers to pay temporary foreign workers up to 15 per cent below the average paid for that type of work locally, sanctioning the creation of a two-tiered “us and them” labour market.
Even if such a rule were rigorously applied and monitored – and budget cuts may eliminate the staff to do this job
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
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