Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your long weekend.

- Thomas Walkom highlights the message being sent to students as to what workers should expect in the years to come. And it's well worth reflecting on whether the problem lies precisely with the politicians so eager to strip away the benefits workers have earned in the past:

The old world, it says, was marked by full-time jobs, stable work environments and long-term employment.

The new world, however, is characterized by short-term jobs. You may be on contract; you may be a temporary employee; you may work part-time. But the key is that you will probably be hired for a very short period (“just-in time work” is the moniker) and then “let go when the work is done.”

You will probably have to hold two or three jobs simultaneously for your entire working life.

You will have no pension, no benefits, no vacations, no sick days.

You will be constantly looking for work. “The permanent job, for the most part, is a thing of the past.”

How do you find a job? The labour market, the pamphlet says, is like a fish market: You are selling a commodity — in this case yourself.

And just as a fishmonger might wrap his mackerel in a fancy package, so you must make your labour power attractive to prospective buyers.
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(T)he norm during that golden period of the 20th century when workers won their most basic rights was economic security. It was assumed that people had the right to live a life beyond the perpetual search for subsistence. If the chaos of the marketplace intervened, that chaos was tamed.

Now the market is back with a vengeance. This world of cutthroat competition and insecure work is not new. It may be disguised by new technologies such as the Internet or Twitter. But in essence it is very, very old. It is a world we thought we had conquered.

- Doug Saunders comments on the need to attack bigotry and religious fearmongering head-on - lest it serve as a breeding ground for the type of violent outburst perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik:

Every act of terrorism is built on a foundation of widely repeated ideas. To convert an ordinary person into a believer who’s willing to commit murder, those ideas must warn of an urgent threat of devastating proportions, one whose resistance and exposure will turn the terrorist into a hero and martyr. They must be repeated so often that they can be perceived as a crystalline truth that will be unveiled by the terrorist’s act.
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(Anti-Muslim writers) begin with a demographic error: The claim that Muslims naturally have higher birth rates than others, that their numbers are growing faster than other new-immigrant groups did, that true Islamic believers are bound to become a majority in the West. This is demonstrably false.

Then they add a cultural error: that Muslims are nearly all literalist believers, that theirs is not merely another religion but a guiding ideology that commands its followers, that religion is the main force in the lives of these people so they can’t become ordinary members of Western secular societies. This, too, is demonstrably false.

Finally, they conclude with a millenarian message of impending societal takeover, in which the demographic and cultural fictions are combined into an urgent warning that, unless an unspecified something is done, we’ll all be under “their” command. Their works reserve their harshest condemnation for the political parties that dare tolerate or encourage this “takeover.”

Now we know that the authors of these works are part of a continuum of response that includes violence at its extreme end. Their ideas should never be banned or outlawed. But these figures, like moderates in other such movements, have a responsibility to work to eliminate the threats that have emerged from their ranks. And we all have a responsibility to expose their dangerous fictions.

- Scott Tracey criticizes the Cons' stubborn refusal to engage with reality when it comes to actual crime rates, and the policies which can actually serve to reduce them.

- Finally, Ontario's provincial election is shaping up to be a wild one. And Andrea Horwath's stunning favourability rating of 63% and climbing - paired with sub-50% numbers for each of the other two main leaders - suggests that there's plenty of upside for the NDP as the campaign develops.