Thursday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your day.

- Thomas Walkom points out that the effect of cracking down on peaceful and legal strikes - as the Cons are so determined to do - is to force workers to take more creative steps to make their concerns heard:

Canada’s messy labour relations system exists for a reason.

People don’t like being pushed around at work. They’ll put up with a certain amount of grief, depending on how fearful they are.

But at some point, enough is enough. In one way or another, they fight back.

Legal strikes allow this bitterness to express itself in carefully managed ways. To outlaw strikes is to encourage that anger to express itself in a different and more creative fashion.
...
For Air Canada’s flight attendants, the screeners’ campaign suggests a new form of industrial action to use now that the Conservative government has moved to prevent a strike.

Air travel is chock-a-block with rules. If flight attendants adhered strictly to these rules, they could almost certainly disrupt Air Canada’s schedule enough to pressure the company.

And if the government legislated against that, the flight attendants could try something else.

There are many ways for angry employees to demonstrate their feelings. A legal strike is only the most civilized.

- Brian Topp comments on the meaning of the Occupy movement, while Romeo Saganash points out how the Harper Cons are governing by and for the few in a new blog which should make for an interesting exchange of posts as the NDP's leadership campaign progresses.

- Duncan Cameron offers one suggestion to make sure that Canada's financial sector serves the public rather than the other way around:

As the Occupy movement spreads in Canada, the focus should be clear: nationalize the banks. The 1981-82 "Great Recession" led the Canadian Labour Congress to adopt a resolution to that effect at its convention. Even the NDP proposed to nationalize one bank. Now is the time to take up the issue again.

Bank credit is created based on our ability as a society to repay loans out of future economic activity. The public should decide democratically what projects should be undertaken in the general interest, and allocate credit accordingly. Public credit for private profit makes no sense at all, unless the general interest is being well served. What people are saying is that the system works for one per cent of the population, leaving 99 per cent adrift. Making banking a public utility is the way to turn the situation around.

- Meanwhile, Toby Sanger proposes that Wall Street should be taxed as well as occupied.

- Finally, it's noteworthy enough that Andrew Potter recognizes that the Occupy protesters have a point when it comes to inequality and exploitation. But for Jim Flaherty to acknowledge the same surely speaks to the impossibility of denying the problem of increased inequality - even as the Cons of course do their utmost to exacerbate it.