Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Jake Kivanc points out that what little job growth Canada can claim primarily involves precarious work. And Nora Loreto discusses the crucial link between labour and social change:

(T)o confront climate change, we must imagine the role of workers in the transition to an oil-free economy: how would energy workers, those in the skilled trades, public sector workers, and retail workers engage in this struggle from their workplace?
 

If we want a national child-care system, we must talk about work: both working parents and the childcare workers required to deliver a new system.

If we want community food centres, we must talk about how workers could be engaged in designing, delivering, and resourcing such a program. 

If we want radical health care reform, we must place patients alongside nurses, doctors, cafeteria workers, social workers, secretaries, archivists, maintenance staff, and everyone else who makes the health care system operate to achieve our radical reforms.      

  

If we want to enact the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we must include workplaces as a site of reconciliation, both to deliver on the commission’s recommendations but to also reach Canadians where they spend most of their waking lives.

There is no new internet without tech workers, there are no alternative food systems without farmers and grocers, there are no new Canadian films without actors and crew, there is no support for artists without funding artists to do their work and paying people to promote and help them out. 

And, within our workplaces, there is no shortage of things we need to fight to improve. We need better pay. We need (better) workplace protections. We need (better) pensions. We need (better) jobs.

- Michelle Chen points out how privatization results in degraded services for the people who need then, while rewarding nobody other than rent-seeking corporations.

- Pete Evans reports on the OECD's look at Canada's appallingly high child care costs.

- Bill McKibben writes that any serious effort to combat climate change requires that we not only elect governments willing to speak about the issue, but pressure them to live up to their promises - a lesson which many within the Libs might want to take to heart. And Lauri Myllyvirta and Joanna Mills expose the utter futility of Brad Wall's attempt to pitch "clean coal" as a technology worth developing for export, as the key market in China is slashing planned coal plant construction.

- Finally, Susan Delacourt challenges the conventional political wisdom that young citizens aren't interested in how they're governed.