Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Jim Stanford highlights a trend of employers forcing work stoppages in order to force massive concessions out of their employees - and notes that the Harper Cons seem to be entirely in favour of that kind of economic disruption as long as it's workers who stand to lose out:

(B)usiness leaders have warmed to work stoppages. In the current bargaining environment, companies (especially multinational firms) hold the best cards. And executives are increasingly willing to precipitate their own work stoppages – through management lockouts – to enforce demands for lower wages and benefits.

Two New Year’s Day lockouts highlighted this strategy. U.S.-based Caterpillar Inc. locked out 450 locomotive builders in London, Ont., demanding wage cuts of more than 50 per cent. The same day, Rio Tinto, the U.K.-based mining giant, locked out 755 smelter workers in Alma, Que. That company’s demand to outsource all future bargaining-unit openings would ultimately achieve an even larger reduction in wages. In both cases, the future of middle-class incomes in our manufacturing and resource sectors is at stake. And in both cases, executives are willing to lock the doors until workers swallow their pill.
...
The popularity of lockouts reflects the dramatic tilting of the labour relations playing field in recent years. With unions on the defensive, management is eager to go for the jugular. Government has stood back or, worse, egged on the lockouts (as Ottawa did with Canada Post). Multinational firms are especially aggressive, given their ability (underwritten by free-trade agreements) to shift production and capital seamlessly between jurisdictions.

This trend is troubling, for macroeconomic as well as ethical reasons. As employers ratchet down compensation, income shifts from consumers (who spend every penny) to corporations (which sit on a growing pile of uninvested cash). That undermines aggregate spending and weakens the recovery. And the more employers succeed in driving down wages, the greater the danger of setting off a cycle of deflation in wages and prices (such as the one that bedevilled Japan for a decade).

- Meanwhile, Paul Krugman cuts through Mitt Romney's spin about the tax rate Romney pays personally to raise a deeper point about the main excuse proffered for constant corporate tax slashing:

(I)t’s kind of peculiar to see conservatives jumping up and down to say that Mitt Romney does too pay reasonable taxes if you include the profits taxes on the corporations in which he invests. Because if memory serves me, just a few years ago conservatives were denouncing the “flypaper theory” of tax incidence, arguing that much of the burden of corporate taxes really falls on labor, not on stockholders. Is it just my imagination?

No, it isn’t. They really did make this argument. Repeatedly.

And the truth is that I always took this argument semi-seriously...

(T)here is a strong sense of trying to have it both ways. When people raise questions about big tax cuts for corporations, we’re told not to worry, because corporate taxes mainly fall on labor, not on stockholders. When people raise questions about low taxes on the very rich, we’re told not to worry because once you include all the taxes corporations have paid on their behalf as stockholders, their taxes aren’t really that low.

Funny how that works.

- The NCC's attacks on Bob Rae have a few of the country's better-informed political observers thinking about how to address the ability of big-money donors to exert disproportionate influence on Canada's political debate. Kady O'Malley and Scot Reid suggest that the problem can be dealt with through disclosure requirements, while Andrew Coyne proposes that third-party groups should be subject to the same pool of funds as political parties (with a cap on individual donations applying to both).

- Finally, Andrew Potter considers the Cons' latest blather about "red tape" to be just the latest example of Tony Clement being instructed to introduce policy targeted toward the non-thinking:

How does one-for-one help us determine what regulations are good, and which are bad? This emphasis on the absolute numbers of rules, as opposed to their relative effectiveness, is just as brainless as the old Soviet practice of treating hours worked or widgets produced as the mark of economic growth. Who cares what the work was on, or whether anyone wanted any widgets.

To see how confused this is, try applying the one-for-one rule to everything else the government does. How about, for every new law the government wants to enact, it has to eliminate one. For every criminal it wants to imprison, it has to release one. For every tax it wants to cut, it has to increase another. For every cabinet member it wants to add, it has to fire another.

This could actually be a fun little parlour game, but it is no way to run a country. Except it is the same brand of bucktoothed libertarianism that has become this government’s signature approach to public policy. Whether it is about treating drug abuse, dealing with crime, running a statistics agency, or engaging in just about any of the other routine tasks of keeping a G8 country going, the Conservatives have made a habit of giving Canadians policy cooked up by people who can’t figure out whether they have a bigger crush on Robert Heinlein, or Ann Coulter.

This isn’t just some amusing little fanboy fugue. It has real consequences for the country and for our ability to make sensible and effective laws and policy.

[Edit: fixed attribution for last column.]