February 3, 2011
The Labour and Inequality Issue
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- Labour and Inequality Issue
- Globalization has lost credibility
- Hennesy Index: Inequality
- Operation Maple
- Poor No More
- Freedom of Association in a Free Enterprise System: Wal-Mart in Jonquière
- The United States of Inequality
- Golden Gavel Awards – The Court
- Inequality: where are women’s bylines?
- Neutrality Agreements
- Favorability Ratings of Labor Unions Fall Sharply
- More Library Guides
- The haves, the have-nots and the dreamless dead
- Book of the Week
Labour and Inequality Issue
The January 22nd, 2011 issue of The Economist features two special reports, The Rich and the rest: What to do (and not do) about inequality and A Special report on Global leaders: The few: In the information age, brainy people are rewarded with wealth and influence, says Robert Guest. What does this mean for everyone else?
The Economist’s unsigned editorial (there are no bylines in The Economist as explained by Wikipedia) prescribes a free market economy to solve social and economic ills, apparently wrongly attributed to income inequality, and informs the “Davos elites” that they can stop worrying (stop meeting?) because The Economist has the answer to our income distribution woes -- “nothing boosts competition and loosens social barriers better than freer commerce” [p. 34].
The Perry Work Report will make an effort to supply an antidote --let us say-- right the balance and perform our non-partisan duty by giving the other side of the story. So say good bye to the January blues and take a walk on the union/everyday human side of life. [thank you Lou]
The Onion’s: Gap between Rich and Poor Named 8th Wonder of the World -- has a grasp of income inequality that The Economist should envy.
Globalization has lost credibility
“Davos Man went into Denial. He didn't get the damage done to average people in the West by the Great Recession. He didn't accept responsibility for that damage. He didn't understand the loss of credibility and face for his system of liberal capitalism that has occurred. There were hundreds of sessions at WEF this year. Few were designed to address one key issue: Globalization has lost credibility and support among the middle class and poor in the U.S. and much of Europe.”
Fast Company, January 31, 2011: Davos Man's New Clothes: The World Economic Forum in Naked Denial, by Bruce Nussbaum
Hennesy Index: Inequality
“The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative's Trish Hennessy has long been a fan of Harper Magazine's one-page list of eye-popping statistics, Harper's Index. Instead of wishing for a Canadian version to magically appear, she's created her own -- a monthly listing of numbers about Canada and its place in the world. Hennessy's Index -- a number is never just a number -- comes out on the first of each month.”
HENNESSY’S INDEX: A number is never just a number, February 2011 – Inequality (1 page, PDF)
Operation Maple
It seems like just yesterday that the question of whether modern media could help bring about social change was a big question mark. An October 2010 article in the New Yorker called “Small Change” was doubtful about this while an Op Ed piece in the NY Sunday Times a few months later was more positive. Then just a few days ago the government in Egypt banned twitter followed by cell phones and now internet service in an attempt to quell citizen protests. In fact the whole issue of social media and attempts at social change in Egypt has become full blown. It works big time.
The social inequities in Canada are not as severe as they are in Egypt but the question remains: can social media play a part in encouraging social change – in Canada?
To be sure, there must be social unrest before social media can play its part, but there’s no shortage of that in Canada – the privatization of healthcare, the rising poverty rate in children, the attack on unions, the Harper cuts to women’s organizations across the country, the list goes on and on. And left on the sidelines are the millions of victims who seem to have nowhere to turn.
With this in mind, Operation Maple made three assumptions when it began last October:
1) The organizations that usually speak out on social issues have been largely discredited by the mainstream media. Their views are typically reported as being from the “left”. The Globe is notorious at this. As a result public service workers have come to be looked upon as “fat cats”, unions themselves as money grabbers, healthcare coalitions as groups with special interests and so on. Even pensions are beginning to be considered luxuries. It follows then that the heads of these various groups will have limited clout when trying to get their views across.
2) What still holds true though is that people respond positively to the lives and experiences of real people put to screen; and,
3) People also want levity; a relief from dark themes now and again - therefore Operation Maple’s occasional attempt at humour. This is the toughest.
The results are: (The Perry Work Report will feature one Operation Maple video per week)
Operation Maple: Word on the Street - To Kill a Union (Part One)
Operation Maple: Word on the Street - To Kill a Union (Part Two)
This is such a typical scene: a small group of workers walking the strike line. So people drive by feeling they know the story. Again Operation Maple simply opened the camera lens and let them speak and by virtue of what they say we understand their story a bit more. We now know why they are out there. We understand their anger; we share some of it ourselves. The idea of a foreign company coming in and taking over a local plant then demanding a 25% cut in wages and benefits seems so lopsidedly unjust. Especially for men and women who had worked there for up to 35 years and expected to retire on a decent pension; but they’ve been on the line now for close to three years and living on $225/wk. Told in this way, by the people who are living it, it’s easy to make the connection.
Poor No More
“Poor No More will be the first film to explain the roots of the economic crisis, its impact on Canadians, and what can be done about it. It is designed to build public support for a real reduction in poverty. Poor No More will attract a wide audience and help move this issue from the margins to the mainstream.”
Neil Brooks: Osgoode Hall Law professor: YouTube: Neil Brooks on the influence of the wealthy -- clip from documentary "Poor No More":
Freedom of Association in a Free Enterprise System: Wal-Mart in Jonquière
This paper first examines Wal-Mart’s well-documented pattern of resistance to unionization. It then considers whether the majority’s position is defensible in the light of the wording of the Quebec statute, the Court’s previous commitment to the purposive interpretation of statutory unfair labour practice provisions, and its recent commitment to protecting collective bargaining as an important derivative of the guarantee of freedom of association in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Particular attention is paid to the origins of the idea, especially in the United States, that an employer has the right to close a business even in order to avoid a union, and to how that idea has been addressed by labour boards across Canada.
“Freedom of Association in a Free Enterprise System: Wal-Mart in Jonquière,” by Michael MacNeil, Carleton University, Department of Law, Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, Vol. 15, 2010. Available on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
The United States of Inequality
Timothy Noah kicked off this series by looking at whether race, gender, or the breakdown of the nuclear family affected income inequality, and then he examined immigration, the technology boom, federal government policy, the decline of labor unions, international trade, whether the ultra wealthy are to blame, and what role the decline of K-12 education has played. In conclusion, Noah explained why we can't ignore income inequality. Want to print this? The series is also available as a PDF (40 pages).
Slate, September 2010: The Great Divergence series: you can click on each section from this page
Slate, Sept. 12, 2010: Why we can’t ignore income inequality: The Great Divergence and the Death of Organized Labor By Timothy Noah
The great Divergence in pictures: a visual guide to income inequality
Golden Gavel Awards – The Court
…and the award for Civil Judgment of the Year goes to…
“FULLOWKA v. PINKERTON’S OF CANADA LTD., 2010 SCC 5, on the potential liability of the security firm hired to ease tensions in the labour dispute at Giant Mine, where a 1992 explosion killed nine people.”
“I suspect that Fullowka v. Pinkerton’s of Canada Ltd. may be regarded in the popular media as the unsatisfying denouement to a heartbreaking judicial saga. An incredibly sympathetic claimant group has been denied recovery from their protectors’ collective failure to prevent grievous bodily harm by a set of reasons that may be legally sound but at times seem deficient. Still, while it is unfortunate the legal community will have to wrestle with the issues the Supreme Court left unresolved, hopefully this final decision will help deliver closure to the families of victims, burdened by years of legal proceedings following the tragedy at the Giant Mine.’
No relief for victims of the Giant Mine disaster, February 23rd, 2010 by Daniel Del Gobbo
Inequality: where are women’s bylines?
“Women may be shattering glass ceilings, but not in the literary world. So a new report from the women's literary organization VIDA suggests. VIDA has just posted a breakdown by gender of contributors to magazines—mainstream ones such as the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the New Republic, and smaller literary journals such as the Paris Review, Tin House, and Poetry—over the course of 2010. They also counted how many women and men's books were reviewed in each. But the real novelty is the inclusion of smaller journals, allowing for side-by-side comparison with the bigger magazines.” (New Yorker, Harpers, New York Review of Books and Atlantic Monthly -- mainstream – what universe is this? – o yes New York!))
Slate, February 2, 2011: Women at Work: A new tally shows how few female writers appear in magazines. By Meghan O'Rourke
VIDA, Women in the Literary Arts, February 2011: survey results
Neutrality Agreements
“Two of the country's biggest health-care unions are working together to secure deals with hospital chains as part of a growing strategy to buck a trend of declining unionization.
The Service Employees International Union and the California Nurses Association are signing so-called neutrality agreements with the chains, in which the hospitals don't object to organizing and the unions don't conduct negative campaigns against the employers or try to organize workers at certain hospitals.”
Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2011: Unions Enter Pacts to Boost Members
Favorability Ratings of Labor Unions Fall Sharply
One year old but still a useful and unique survey.
PEW Research Centre, February 23, 2010: Favorability Ratings of Labor Unions Fall Sharply
More Library Guides
Very cool – ILR Scool uses the Canadian film Final Offer as its teaching tool for collective bargaining and they can do this because all of the National Film Board films are publicly available for streaming!
Cornell University Library Guide: Collective Bargaining, Labor Relations, and Labor Unions
The haves, the have-nots and the dreamless dead
In 2007, when the world was on the brink of financial crisis, U.S. income inequality hit its highest mark since 1928, just before the Great Depression.
Reuters Special Report, October 22, 2010: The haves, the have-nots and the dreamless dead, By Emily Kaiser
Book of the Week
The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic. Basic Books, 2010, 272 p. ISBN-10: 0465019749
“Written by the World Bank economist and development specialist Branko Milanovic, this survey of income distribution past and present is constructed as a sort of textbook-almanac hybrid. It revolves around three technical essays summarizing the academic literature on inequality, which are each followed by a series of quick-hit vignettes about quirkier subjects, like how living standards in 19th-century Russia may have influenced Anna Karenina’s doomed romance, or who the richest person in history was.” ]from the New York Times]
New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 28, 2011: Thy Neighbor’s Wealth By Catherine Rampell
About the Author:
Branko Milanovic is Lead Economist in the World Bank's research group and visiting professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Ph.D. in economics 1987, Belgrade University, Yugoslavia. Interests: income distribution, poverty, political economy of reform. Areas: Eastern Europe, East Asia.
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