Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Asher Schecter interviews Emmanuel Saez about the realities of growing inequality - and the denialists looking to exacerbate it. And Chris Hayes talks to Gabriel Zucman about the benefits of a wealth tax.

- Laurie Monsebraaten reports on a new study showing how Canada could eradicate poverty with a basic income. And Alison McIntosh and Rebecca Graff McRae examine what a basic income could mean for Alberta.

- Meanwhile, Steven Greenhouse and Sharon Block each discuss a new study calling for a boost to the bargaining power of American workers, with an emphasis on sectoral bargaining which eliminate the race to the bottom between employers. And Jim Stanford writes that we shouldn't attribute to technology what's actually the result of choices in defining the power relationship between employers and workers:

Technology is neither our friend nor our enemy as the world of work changes. And workers face far more urgent problems than being made redundant by automation. Today they confront pervasive precarity, stagnant and unequal incomes, and an absence of voice in their work lives. These challenges cannot be fixed either by the automatic working of market forces or by the advances of digital technology. Instead, they demand quick and powerful responses from policy-makers and other labour market stakeholders.

By focusing on the demand side of the labour market, not just the supply of skilled workers, we can ensure there are fulfilling, productive jobs for future well-trained graduates to fill. By giving workers more protection and more say over technology and how it is managed (rather than leaving those decisions solely up to employers), we can attain a better balance between the goals of profitability and the goals of decent, secure work. By building more representative and participatory structures and processes to address both existing and future workplace challenges, we enhance our collective capacity to manage technological change more successfully and fairly.

- Zaid Noorsumar discusses how profit motives are distorting Ontario's home care system. And the Canadian Labour Congress is pushing for the new minority Parliament to finally implement a national pharmacare system to ensure cost isn't a barrier to the medication people need.

- Finally, Benjamin Perrin declares his recognition that supervised consumption sites are needed as a matter of basic compassion.