Employment and labour

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Here we are in the summer of 2004, fortunate to be living in one of the world’s most resource-endowed countries, and yet many of our students have been unable to find paid employment to fund their college or university education. Hundreds of thousands of older Canadians are in the same predicament. It’s not as if there were no worthwhile and even urgently-needed work to be done, such as replanting our large deforested areas.
More than 500 Canadian motorists and their passengers are killed every year in highway and road collisions with big trucks, and another 11,500 a year, on average, are injured in such collisions. In today’s deregulated free-trade environment, trucking companies are under pressure to cut costs, and governments have bowed to industry lobbying to allow bigger and longer rigs, to exempt them from some regulations, to allow truckers to work longer hours, and to relax or even lower safety standards. The rising carnage on our highways involving big trucks is one of the consequences.
At first glance I find it hard to make sense of the Aliant strike. A very profitable company that claims it is ³deeply committed to the communities in which its employees live and work,² forces its 4,300 workers to walk the picket lines for more than three months.
John Hamm's Labour Day message asks Nova Scotians to "honour the role of working people." But such proclamations do little to address the realities of deteriorating wages and working conditions that workers face.
When the workers at the ill-fated Gold River pulp mill took their severance packages last week, it marked closure on a frustrating struggle to save the mill. The workers are now moving on and there is little point in continuing the polemic over the mill's viability or what government could or should have done.
  Those calling for tax cuts for upper-income earners have found a new cause. For the past year, media reports, newspaper columnists and "think tank" studies have all been sounding the alarm. The latest catch-phrase of the neo-conservative project: the Brain Drain.