Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- If there's any good news in the Cons' constant attacks on labour, it's the growing recognition that workers need to fight back with no less a concerted effort than they're facing from a hostile government. And the possibility that the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada might tie itself into the wider labour movement looks like a huge step on that front.

- Craig McInnes follows up on Canada's drop in global Human Development Index rankings and points out the link to increasing inequality:

With echoes of Occupy Vancouver, Canada's ranking in this year's United Nations Human Development Index was knocked down by a statistical portrait of an unjust society.

For a country that prides itself as a land of equal opportunity, that's a bit hard to take.
...
For most of the 1990s, we held bragging rights to the top spot in the annual rankings based on access to education, long and healthy lives and livable incomes.

For the past decade we've slipped a bit, with oil-rich Norway dominating first place and Canada floating around the top 10. That slippage doesn't mean much since the top countries are tightly bunched together, especially compared with those farther down the list.

Canada is ranked sixth this year, up two spots from last year. But we tumble seven notches when our base rating is adjusted for inequality - that is, how well-off Canadians are doing compared with those at the bottom of the pile. We drop even farther - to 20th, when our ranking is adjusted for gender inequality.

- Erik Loomis highlights an all-too-typical example as to the real effects of free trade agreements:

With free trade agreements, we recreate Gilded Age labor and environmental conditions in the developing world. We have simply exported all the negatives of the Industrial Revolution. We were promised cheap goods and information economy. They were promised jobs. Instead, we are mired in an economic slump without a foreseeable end and a failed information economy while they live in endemic poverty and suffer environmental poisoning.

- Finally, the NDP's closing argument in the Saskatchewan election campaign nicely sums up what's at stake: