Archive for the ‘Employment History’ Category
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Harper and McGuinty should look to Sir John A. on debt
April 12, 2012
… the temptation when public finances are bad is to think small. Let’s cut a little here, trim back our vision there, and eventually things will be okay. But Confederation provides a stirring example of why thinking big is exactly what we need to do in the face of public debt… Now is not the time for a new National Policy, per se. .. But our current financial challenges should be viewed as an opportunity to think that big.
Tags: budget, economy, globalization
Posted in Employment History | No Comments »
How Canada let Caterpillar strip a plant clean
Feb 04 2012
… the union was locked out on New Year’s Day. There were no replacement workers to bust the union, because the union was merely invited to slit its own wrists — by halving most wages from $34 to $16.50 an hour. The U.S.-based owner, multinational giant Caterpillar Inc… started and ended this negotiation with a carefully choreographed plan to pack up, shut down and leave town… It won’t just relocate the heavy equipment on the factory floor, but harvest the technological know-how subsidized with government incentives and writeoffs. This wasn’t bullying, it was highway robbery — with our politicians watching from the sidelines.
Tags: economy, featured, globalization, ideology, rights, standard of living
Posted in Employment History | No Comments »
How Keynes made the world a better place
Dec. 3, 2011
At its heart, macroeconomics is all about identifying interdependencies in an economy: correctly identify the variables and their relationship to each other, and governments can use them as so many levers to lift people out of poverty and jump-start ailing economies… while Grand Pursuit is a story with many geniuses, there is one genius who towers over them all: Keynes… [However,] at a time when most economists are calling for more stimulus spending and regulation, we instead have governments, our own included, talking up belt-tightening and laissezfaire capitalism.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living, tax
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Seeing modern economics as a ‘grand pursuit’
Sep 16 2011
… in her just-released Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, Nasar surveys 200 years of economic thought… “I realized that modern economics was a grand pursuit to overcome scarcity, to take charge of destiny…” “The core of economic genius is an exercise of imagination, seeing that what seemed to be fixed and frozen could be altered. That humanity could escape the age-old sentence to nasty, short and brutish lives, that nations could make their own destinies.”
Tags: economy, standard of living
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Strikes losing historic leverage
Jun 20 2011
Union membership has steadily declined over the past three decades, to a current 30.8 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce. The comparable figure for the U.S. is a mere 12.3 per cent. The sharp drop in union membership is cited as a leading cause of the flatlining of inflation-adjusted middle-class incomes in Canada and the U.S… A 17-month strike at Caterpillar Inc. in 1994 marked a turning point in North American labour relations… striking workers eventually returned to work without a contract. Employers have been playing hardball ever since.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, rights, standard of living
Posted in Employment History | 2 Comments »
Call a spade a spade: capitalism
Dec 21 2010
I am puzzled about the… identification of “corporate greed” as the cause of social and economic exploitation. It is merely the symptom of philosophical liberalism that fosters an economic practice that privileges self-regarding behaviour, which is expected to lead to public virtue…. by the mid-1970s… the Anglo-American liberal democracies had full confidence that they no longer needed the co-operation of organized labour… [and] went to work in attacking social programs and the right of workers to unionize their workplaces.
Tags: economy, ideology, rights, standard of living
Posted in Employment History, Employment Policy Context | No Comments »
Canadian Banks: A better system
NationalPost.com – News&Sectors – Canadian Banks: A better system
Published: Friday, April 03, 2009. Theresa Tedesco and John Turley-Ewart, Financial Post
Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, neatly summed up this week what a growing number of financial leaders are saying about Canada’s banks: “Our system is better.”
Posted in Employment History, Governance History | No Comments »
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