Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Sheila Block points out the problems with the spread of low-paying, precarious jobs. And PressProgress fact-checks the CFIB's attempt to make as many workers' lives as precarious as possible by suppressing minimum wages and standards.

- But Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports that Ontario's provincial government is making matters worse by handing millions of dollars to the same temp agencies who are most aggressively flouting employment standards laws. And the Star warns of the need to ensure that Toronto's plan to fight poverty actually leads to action.

- Meanwhile, Ezra Klein points out the importance of how we label life without stable work in discussing the radically different perception of involuntary unemployment compared to early retirement:

Saying "I'm unemployed" is very different than saying "I retired at 32, and it's amazing." The question is, can someone who doesn't start with much social status — Ferriss is a Princeton graduate, Mr. Money Mustache an ex-software engineer — manage the same trick?

This is one of the questions that will decide whether a post-work world becomes a dystopia. Does whatever replaces work get branded more like unemployment or more like extreme retirement? What happens when you tell someone you just met on Tinder that you don't have a full-time job, but you really love hiking?

I am not worried that a post-work world can't be a good world. I am just worried that it won't be — that guilt-free early retirement will be a luxury reserved for people who can get good jobs, and denied to people who can't.

- Finally, Heather Mallick writes that we should all learn from Harry Leslie Smith's experience about the importance of a functioning society. And Duncan Cameron reminds us that it's only a tiny group of financial elites who stand to profit from the austerity that does so much damage to the vast majority of citizens.