This study examines the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s labour chapter and finds it cannot adequately protect, let alone enhance, labour rights across the TPP region, as promised by the Canadian and U.S. governments. This is because the TPP chapter largely reproduces the NAFTA model, with its escape clauses for national governments accused of violating worker rights, and its ineffective and complicated dispute process for challenging labour violations.
Employment and labour
First published in the Winnipeg Free Press July 18, 2016
Unless immediate action is taken, 2016 will be the first time in a generation that minimum wage workers will see their wages stagnate, which will result in fewer earnings for basics like food and shelter.
The 2016 budget failed to signal even an inflationary increase in the minimum wage. This means these earners will make $400 less in 2016/17 – the first minimum wage freeze in 16 years.
This issue of OnPolicy gives you a road map to working poverty in nine Ontario cities: Ottawa, London, Toronto, Thunder Bay, Kingston, Waterloo Region, Sudbury, Windsor and Hamilton. The Summer 2016 issue of OnPolicy also offers some solutions to the problems of working poverty, such as improving food security and providing dental benefits for the working poor, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, tackling precarity in the workplace and improving working conditions for low-wage work.
Crossword answers:
We are often told that the solution to poverty is for the poor to “get a job” or for various sectors to create more jobs. But the reality is that a job is not a guaranteed path out of poverty. Many of the new jobs created in BC since the 2008 recession have been part-time, temporary and low paid. The result is a growing group of workers living in poverty, the working poor.
(Vancouver) Contrary to stereotypes about poverty being concentrated mainly in Vancouver and Surrey, a new study finds the growing ranks of the working poor are spread out across the Metro Vancouver region.
This study examines Metro Vancouver working poverty trends by neighbourhood pre- and post- the 2008 recession. We are often told that the solution to poverty is for the poor to “get a job” or for various sectors to create more jobs. But this study finds that a job is not a guaranteed path out of poverty. Over 100,000 working-age people in Metro Vancouver were working but stuck below the poverty line in 2012, not counting students and young adults living at home with their parents.
In the so-called sharing economy, new technological platforms are exploiting regulatory gaps under the banner of progress. Corporate heads are taking advantage of this and good jobs are disappearing. We’ve seen a version of this experiment in the recent past. Before Uber, there were unpaid internships, layoffs and downsizing, and start-up agencies vying for a piece of the traditional journalism pie. Together, they transformed the industry in a process that continues today.
First published by CBC Manitoba on June 2016
Industry insiders claim that the Energy East Pipeline will create tens of thousands of jobs across Canada and add tens of billions of dollars to GDP. Our study not only puts these claims into question, it highlights important considerations such as the Social Cost of Carbon, Canada's commitment to fight climate change and the economic viability of heavy crude production under current pricing regimes. The report also explains how Manitoba's ability to develop and expand renewable energy sources offers more potential to create decent jobs and a more sustainable economy.
Each year up to 400 mostly Mexican workers come to Manitoba under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) to work on local farms. They perform physically strenuous work on vegetable farms and in greenhouses for up to eight months, year after year. Workers regularly toil twelve hours per day, six to seven days a week, and they live socially isolated from Canadian society.