Category Labour markets
EI and I on CBC
I was on CBC Newsworld's show Politics this afternoon, along with Derek Burleton of TD Economics, talking about the opposition parties' insistence that the government reduce the number of hours worked before becoming eligible for Employment Insurance (see here, here and here). You can watch the video here – we're in the first segment. We […]
Worthless Canadian Reaction?
What else can you call it, when two large Canadian labour unions call for a Buy Canadian provision in government spending? Embarrassing? Shameful? Perhaps "imprudent" might be the best word, given Canada's reliance on foreign trade.
Probably not the best stimulus proposal I’ve seen so far
The Quebec government released an economic statement thingy (pdf) today, announcing six measures to counter the recession. Here is number five: [W]e are acting on our commitment to raise the minimum wage to protect thepurchasing power of low-wage workers. The minimum wage will be raised by 50cents an hour next May 1, bringing it to […]
Job creation, job destruction, and the Detroit Three bailouts
The most compelling argument for the Detroit Three bailout is not that North America must always have a certain number of people working in the auto sector. Our economic history is one of industries that start from nothing, grow, and then are displaced (if not replaced) by even newer industries. There's nothing special about the […]
Always hire the worst
"Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Once upon a time, in a city called Ottawa…." "I thought it was called Windsor?" "No dear, that's another story. Once upon a time, the City of Ottawa needed to hire one person to do a job…." "I thought it was a car factory?"
The curious economics of university faculty unions
I was on strike a couple of weeks ago, for the span of three days. Not just me, of course; the faculty at l'Université Laval is unionised. The whole notion of faculty unions seems a bit odd to me, and it's not just the incongruous image of seeing tenured professors whose salaries put them in […]
So where were we?
Now that it's been decided who will form the government, it's time to look at the problems facing it and what it can and should do about them. The next few posts will be data-oriented, trying to provide some background. Today, I'm going to look at the state of the labour market. In the US, […]
On the political economy of a basic income
The idea of a basic income – it’s generally referred to as a Guaranteed Annual Income in Canada – has been floated again. My initial reaction was that this is such a good idea that it’s hard to figure out why we don’t have it already. For some reason, there doesn’t seem to much in […]
How manufacturing employment has fallen
We all know that increasing commodity prices and the resulting appreciation of the CAD has resulted in a reduction in employment in the manufacturing sector: The shift of productive resources out of the manufacturing sector is of course the appropriate response to the relative price movements we’ve seen over the past five years, and the […]
Real wages and productivity revisited
Andrew Jackson says: I’ve argued for years, with much of the left, that average worker pay has lagged productivity growth mainly because of the increased bargaining power of capital vis a vis labour due to “globalization”, attacks on unions etc etc. There’s another explanation. It turns out that the way real wages are measured – […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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