Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Scott Santens rightly notes that even if every single person without a job was willing to accept absolutely anything, we have no reason to expect job markets to make enough work available to support a livelihood for everybody:

(T)here are more unemployed people than jobs available across each sector of the job market, even including health care, and that one's considered practically a slam dunk at this point in terms of finding employment.

There are simply not enough jobs for everyone to have a job all at the same time.

Doesn't this sound kind of familiar? This idea that we walk around and around looking for something along with others looking for the same thing, only to find that some, and possibly even us, must in the end be excluded from what we seek?

It sounds like a game we all played as kids...

The job market is actually a game of musical chairs.

There is however a key difference between a game of musical chairs and the way our job market works, and that's that when the music stops in musical chairs, the winner is sitting while the loser is just left standing. But because the only way to gain access to the resources we need to survive is through the earning of income, those unable to earn an income aren't just left standing. They are left in poverty. And poverty hurts.

So now let's imagine a game of musical chairs played on a hot bed of coals. There are 10 people and 5 chairs, the same ratio as exists right now in 2015. Everyone is hopping around trying not to get burned, when the music stops. Five people are rewarded with security from pain, and five people begin to burn.

- Ella Bedard examines the demographic shifts within the union movement over the past few decades. And Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig describes the massive benefits the workers who form part of the movement earn through collective bargaining.

- Meanwhile, Nicole Charky discusses how just-in-time scheduling places massive burdens on workers to serve the sole purpose of expanding corporate profit margins. And Ethel Tungohan looks at human rights abuses by an Ontario employer as yet another example of the dire need for change in Canada's use of temporary foreign workers.
 
- Josh Hoxie points out that calls for austerian belt-tightening invariably seem to leave plenty of money to be showered on those who already have the most. And LOLGOP comments on the grossly outsized influence the wealthy few exert on U.S. politics.

- Finally, Leehi Yona calls out the Cons' continued climate negligence going into the U.N.'s next set of climate change negotiations, while Scott Vrooman suggests we should stop being so polite about the issue. Crawford Kilian reports on the scientific case to stop new tar sands developments. And Andrew Nikiforuk observes that Alberta is now among the many jurisdictions facing an increased danger of earthquakes due to fracking.