An interesting piece from Dissent arguing that the Civil Rights Act should be extended to cover discrimination “on the basis of seeking union membership” as previous attempts to reform labor laws have failed.
TweetInteresting article on how Canadian unions are influencing the NDP leadership campaign election when it’s One Member One Vote and they can’t donate anymore
Tweet
We do solemnly swear that we will never under any circumstances work for lower wages or under worse conditions than we now promise one another.
We make this Vow, in secure knowledge that if we all are true to our pledge the employer will be forced to meet our demand.
Social mobility has become a kind of political sublimation for policymakers who have been largely unable (or unwilling) to tackle the fundamental causes of wage polarisation, and rising wealth and earnings inequality, in the domain of the economy itself. There is now a voluminous academic literature on these issues, citing various causes of rising inequalities: technological change and increases in the wage returns to education and skills; the decline of trade unions and the weakening of the power of labour in advanced economies as globalisation has brought millions of low-paid workers onto the global labour market; and the rise of the financial sector and its ability to capture an increased share of GDP in profits paid in bonuses.
What is noticeable about this list is that only education and skills have been the explicit target of social mobility strategies. Improving educational attainment and skills levels is amenable to policy intervention, even if it takes considerable energy and policy resources. That it is why it has featured so heavily in the lexicon of social mobility policy documents. But it also delineates the limits of modern statecraft: governments have not gone beyond the supply of skills into the deeper terrain of political economy.
Pearce may be writing about the United Kingdom but his analysis is equally applicable to Australia.
Tweet
