Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Eric Levitz discusses the glaring gap between Americans' policy preferences, and the outcomes from a political system which falls far short of representing most people in the face of the influence of the ultra-rich. And Matthew Yglesias comments on the hack gap between the U.S.' two main political parties. 

- Robert Reich highlights how Donald Trump has only further enriched the wealthy while making life more precarious for the rest of the U.S. Mike Crawley reports on Doug Ford's plans to strip Ontario workers of their already-minimal gains in wages and employment standards. And Don Braid comments on Jason Kenney's promises to run roughshod over Alberta workers and consumers in exchange for corporate cash.

- Meanwhile, Sally McManus writes about the need for more fairness for Australian workers:

The problem of excessive corporate power and greed is far wider than two or three industries. Across the economy, we have seen wages go backwards in real terms over the past year, whereas profits grew 9.7 per cent, seasonally adjusted, based on the National Accounts. This is no accident – we have lost the power needed to bargain for fair wages because big business now has too much power.

Increasingly workers' capacity to bargain for better pay and conditions is hampered by a system that allows employers to frustrate the process.

Even the International Monetary Fund has pointed to the disempowerment of workers to negotiate fair pay with the deregulation of the labour market, saying this has underpinned the sluggish global recovery for workers’ wages since the global financial crisis.
...
There are a lot of changes required to fix the broken rule book of Australia’s workplace relations system, but the reforms should be built around laws that rebalance the system and give working people a fairer share of the wealth they create.

Our laws should give working people power, to negotiate fair pay and job security and create a balance between the power of the employer to say “no” and the needs of working people to have job security and decent pay for decent work.

- Andrew Nikiforuk discusses the spread of non-disclosure agreements as a means of forcing the people able to expose issues of public importance to refrain from doing so.

- Finally, Andrew Simms and Peter Newell propose a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. And we can only presume that anybody trying to deflect from any action at home in favour of reducing global emissions will be entirely on board.