Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Marc Lee presents an alternative economic vision to the capital-first-and-only approach that currently serves as conventional wisdom.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson suggests five philosophical principles that can help the NDP to form government in 2015 on a social democratic platform:

More – not less – public investment is needed to increase private sector productivity and future economic growth.

Expanding public programs is a more equitable, and also a much more cost effective, way to provide the services we all need.

Expanding public programs is key to shoring up an equal opportunity, middle class society.

We need a strong and productive private sector as well.

Unions shape an equal society.

- And Ken Georgetti expands on the last point:

The people who have been occupying financial districts in Canadian and American cities are motivated by anger over the glaring economic unfairness that exists in our society. The labour movement welcomes what these young people camping outdoors in tents are saying -- because we have said the very same thing for many years.
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Unions have traditionally contributed to a healthy middle class in a number of ways. They limited to some degree the share of total national income that goes to corporate profits. That corporate share now is near a record high in Canada and the U.S. as the bargaining power of unions has weakened.

Unions have also been able to narrow the pay gap between senior managers and professionals and the rest of the workforce. There is certainly a need for income differentials to compensate employees for taking jobs that require greater skills, effort and responsibility, but the pay gap has risen to absurd levels. As recently as 1995, the average pay of Canada's highest paid 50 CEOs was 85 times the pay of the average worker. Just 15 years later, their average compensation had skyrocketed to 219 times the pay of the average worker.

Unions are also successful in reducing systemic wage gaps in workplaces. Being in a union means better wages for women, workers of colour, aboriginal people and people with disabilities.

It is also true that the more equal wage structure in unionized workplaces will set wage and benefit standards that spill over into non-union workplaces. Those non-union workers tend to be better paid when they live in communities with a critical mass of unionized workers earning decent wages. Experts at the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have confirmed the labour movement's argument that the single best mechanism to narrow the income gap is broad-based collective bargaining.

The final and most important reason why countries with strong labour movements are more equal is that unions advocate for government policies that benefit all working people, not just their own members. Employers, especially large employers, tend to be hostile to unions because we challenge their power in the workplace and the wider society. Beginning 30 years ago, government policies that shifted power and wealth to those who already had more set the stage for today's growing inequity.

- So of course it shouldn't be hard to tell who stands to benefit as Brad Wall and his government keep on attacking unions.