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Why occupy? It’s the inequality.
The Occupy Wall Street protests hinge on injustice, in particular a malaise with the current economic system that has brought us a tremendous inequality and the rise of the super-rich, or top 1%. But...
View ArticleRecovery Demands Increase in Labour’s Share
The just-released 2011 ILO World of Work Report is a must read for progressive economists. Released on the eve of the G-20 meetings, the report underlines the gravity of the current global employment...
View ArticleUpdate on Falling Real Wages
I’ve blogged on this before, and continue to be surprised by the lack of attention paid to the significant ongoing decline of real wages. Falling wages are a key indicator of a very soft job market,...
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Danger: Wage Deflation Ahead
The labour market is in much worse shape than the official 7.3% unemployment rate implies. The latest evidence for this proposition is today’s miserable report on employment and earnings from...
View ArticleTowards a Wage-Led Recovery
A new issue of the International Journal of Labour Research has been published “While a lot of attention has been deservedly given to the financial roots of the current economic crisis, the role of...
View ArticleBattle of the Wages study dispels myths about public sector wages
A comprehensive study released today by CUPE shows there’s no evidence public sector workers are paid consistently more than those in similar jobs in the private sector. Instead, overall average pay in...
View ArticleModest Inflation Outstrips Wages and Canada Social Transfer
Statistics Canada reported today that the annual inflation rate remained 2.9% and the Bank of Canada’s core rate remained 2.1% in November. The monthly increase in consumer prices slowed to 0.1% in...
View ArticleEconomic Climate and Inequality
The December issue of the quarterly Economic Climate for Bargaining publication I produce is now on-line. This issue has a number of pieces on issues of inequality, including: Rising inequality is...
View ArticleBudget Cuts Could Worsen Rising Unemployment
It was not a happy new year for Canadian job seekers. Statistics Canada reported today that unemployment rose for a fourth consecutive month in January. Overall employment remained flat as Canada’s...
View ArticleRecalculating inflation: billions in savings for governments and employers...
The top story in the Globe and Mail today reports on something I warned about a year ago: Statistics Canada is making changes to the way it calculates the Consumer Price Index. At that time I...
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In the Wake of the Crisis: Bully Capitalism
A shorter version of this article appears today at Economy Lab, the Globe and Mail’s on-line business feature. Capitalism has entered an ugly new era, one that may work well for the shareholders of...
View ArticleInflation and Drummond
Statistics Canada reported today that consumer prices jumped in January (by 0.4% or 0.5% seasonally-adjusted), offsetting the drop in December. As a result, the annual inflation rate is now 2.5% and...
View ArticleBC isn’t broke: putting teacher bargaining in perspective
Last Monday, BC teachers held a Day of Action in communities across the province to protest the BC government’s decision to legislate a contract and put an end to their collective bargaining process. I...
View ArticleLabour Force Exodus
Statistics Canada reported this morning that 38,000 people gave up looking for work in February. The official unemployment rate fell because these Canadians were no longer counted as being unemployed....
View ArticleInflation Central
Statistics Canada reported today that consumer prices edged up by 0.1% in February on a seasonally-adjusted basis, bringing the annual inflation rate to 2.6% and the core inflation rate to 2.3%. These...
View ArticleLabour Market Stalls
Canada’s job market stalled in May. Employment edged up by 7,700, almost all of it part-time. In fact, the number of employees paid by Canadian employers fell by 15,600. Total “employment” rose only...
View ArticleIncomes Flat in “Recovery Year” of 2010
Today’s Statscan release of income data for 2010 allow for a backward glance at the state of the recovery. What is most striking is that – following two years of flat income growth in 2008 and 2009 –...
View ArticleCanada’s Economic Problem is NOT High Wages
Bill Curry reports in today’s Globe that, at last year’s economic policy retreat, business leaders urged Finance Minister Flaherty to reduce the pay of “overpriced” Canadian workers, including through...
View ArticleThe End of Men?
The Globe and Mail on Saturday devoted two pages of its Focus section to a discussion of Hanna Rosin’s book, The End of Men. There are a few interesting anecdotes on changing sex roles, but there are...
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Income Inequality & twitter
Armine Yalnizyan had a great twitter debate with Andrew Coyne on poverty and inequality that Trish Hennessey storified here: http://bit.ly/QwHGJB I think it bears repeating that GDP growth has far...
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Ontario hiding savings from lower interest rates
The Ontario government Fall Economic Statement and Fiscal Review ignores and hides billions savings the province will gain from lower borrowing rates in coming years. While this statement acknowledges...
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Welcome to the Wageless Recovery
The Harper government likes to remind Canadians that we’ve done better than most developed nations in bouncing back from the global economic crisis. But digging into the data shows why many people...
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Boost the Minimum Wage, Boost the Economy
A version of this article appeared today in the Globe and Mail’s Economy Lab. (This version includes references to the debate plus charts and graphs from data specially tabulated from Statistics...
View ArticleWomen On Top, By the Numbers
On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we ask: Are more women making it to the top in Canada? And what does that mean for the 100 per cent? The 2013 edition, by the numbers. (All data are most...
View ArticleToday’s Job Numbers: The Bad and The Ugly
The headline numbers are bad enough: “employment declined by 55,000 in March, all in full time. The unemployment rate rose 0.2 percentage points to 7.2%.” The underlying numbers are ugly. The...
View ArticleCrowley’s Red Hot Labour Market
Brian Lee Crowley’s latest column shows he’s a glass-half-full kinda guy. We shouldn’t be worried about unemployment because a) it’s old-fashioned, b) Boomers had it worse (and now they’re getting old)...
View ArticleInflation Eats Up More Than Half of Wage Gains
Today, Statistics Canada reported an inflation rate of 1.2% for June, validating the Bank of Canada’s recent decision to keep interest rates low for the foreseeable future. The rationale to raise...
View ArticleAverage Weekly Earnings: Wages vs. Hours & Salaries
Today, Statistics Canada reported a seemingly impressive monthly rise of 0.9% in average weekly earnings, from $906.24 in April to $914.68 in May. Digging a bit deeper reveals that average weekly...
View ArticleFunding Cuts to Alberta’s PSE Sector: There Are Alternatives
It has recently been reported that the University of Alberta wants to “reopen two-year collective agreements” with faculty and staff “to help the university balance its budget…” This appears to be in...
View ArticleInflation Eats Up Three-Quarters of Wage Gains
Today, Statistics Canada reported an annual inflation rate of 1.3% for July. By comparison, it reports that the average hourly wage rose by 1.8% between July 2012 and July 2013. In other words, even...
View ArticlePart-Time Growth in a “Hamster Wheel” Job Market
Today, Statistics Canada reported that employment increased in August, although two-thirds of the additional jobs were part-time positions. The part-time rate rose to 19%, its highest level in more...
View ArticleFossil-Fueled GDP Growth
Yesterday, Statistics Canada reported that the Canadian economy had a month of fossil-fueled growth in August. Overall GDP was up by 0.3%, only half as much as in July but still a respectable monthly...
View ArticleRaise Wages, Train Workers
I have been hard on our new Employment and Social Development Minister, Jason Kenney, for buying into a widespread myth about labour shortages and skill mismatches in Canada. So, to give credit where...
View ArticleStatCan Debunks Small-Business Mythology
Canadian economic commentators often worship small business as the supposed source of economic dynamism and growth. This cult of small business has greatly influenced public policy, with federal and...
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Problematic sources of recent real wage growth
The past 18 months have seen real wages increase in Canada. (Yes, I double-checked.) Indeed, real wages have gone through two distinct phases of growth since the financial crisis hit the global economy...
View ArticleDutch Disease, Prices and Wages in Saskatchewan
Jim Stanford recently pointed out that many of the conservative economists who had defended the overvalued loonie have quickly shifted to applauding its depreciation. The Government of Saskatchewan may...
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Why the Minimum Wage Debate Isn’t Going to Go Away
Yesterday I tweeted this: <blink> Gap will raise minimum hourly pay Walmart “looking” at support of min wage raise In honour of the momentum, I am posting the piece I wrote for Economy Lab a...
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Women’s Work
My mother says that when she graduated from high school in 1972, she had two occupational choices: nurse or teacher. Nurse and teacher are still the most popular choices for women entering the...
View ArticleJobs Up, But Hours Flat
On the surface, today’s employment numbers simply continue a recent trend: employers added some jobs but not enough to keep pace with Canada’s growing labour force. As a result, unemployment edged back...
View ArticleShould Welfare Recipients Try Harder to Find Work?
This morning the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation released a new report about “motivational interviewing” for welfare recipients. The link to the full report is here, and the link to the...
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Of Rising Tides and Sinking Boats
Recently, Minister Kenney took to twitter to defend his decision to limit the number of precarious workers entering Alberta through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Again, the minister is to be...
View ArticleSeccareccia on Greece, Austerity and the Eurozone
Over at the blog of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Ottawa U professor Mario Seccareccia has given an interview titled “Greece Shows the Limits of Austerity in the Eurozone. What Now?” The...
View ArticleWorkers Link $15 Minimum Wage to Decent Work
Wednesday April 15th is a global day of action on a $15 minimum wage and decent work. Actions are happening across the U.S., and in BC, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. Both in the US and in Canada, workers...
View ArticleThe Myth of STEM Degrees: STEM as the Canary in the Coal Mine
What follow is a guest blog post from Glenn Burley: – If Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and professional fields like medicine, law, and dentistry are the so-called golden...
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Can Capitalists Afford a Trumped Recovery? Guest post by Jonathan Nitzan &...
This provocative guest post submitted by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, was published earlier this year on their bnarchives website. Nitzan, professor of political economy at York University,...
View ArticleTen considerations for the next Alberta budget
On November 17, the working group of the Alberta Alternative Budget (AAB) sponsored a one-day workshop at the University of Alberta. The event’s main purpose was to discuss recent developments in...
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MEDIA RELEASE: Alberta should increase social spending; cuts are not the way...
(June 24, 2019-Calgary) With Alberta’s economy still facing challenges and vulnerabilities, the Alberta government should not be doling out tax cuts or cutting social spending, according to the...
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Ten things to know about the 2019-20 Alberta budget
I’ve just written a ‘top 10’ overview of the recent Alberta budget. Points raised in the post include the following: -The budget lays out a four-year strategy of spending cuts, letting population...
View ArticleMaking the COVID19 Wage Subsidy Program work better for workers
With the federal government is increasing its temporary wage subsidy to 75%, other reforms are needed to ensure the public funding goes to maintain workers, and not pad the profits of businesses. In...
View ArticleMuch stronger conditions needed on federal wage subsidy program
The federal government has announced it is prepared to pay wages subsidies of up to 75% of employee wages for all private businesses and other employers, including non-profits, partnerships and...
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