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Jordan7hm posted:He didn't say anything about being doomed to a poo poo job, but if you're unable to handle changing careers multiple times and what that means for you in terms of prioritizing professional development and maximizing your own opporunities for change, you're going to have a very hard and likely unsatisfying working life. Come on man, you're being as stupid as PT6A here. Of course most of these precarious jobs are going to be low-paying and lovely. Everyone here is perfectly aware of that and without major changes to the labour market there's no way to avoid it. Why are you soft peddling the obvious? As far as prioritising professional development -- you do realise not everyone has a white collar job, right? What you're saying has no meaningful connection to the huge numbers of people carrying boxes, sweeping floors, driving forklifts, etc. Even if they do get training and switch careers, someone else has to step up and fill their place. My construction worker cousin isn't going to get retrained as a computer programmer -- he's going to do semi-skilled labour his entire life. And that's an important worthwhile job and we should have an economy that provides him with a safe workplace, a decent pension for retirement and enough stability to be able to plan a family. And talking about how we need to "redesign how we handle job transitions" is bizarre given that we're already doing that. It's just that we're very consciously taking steps to make our economy more precarious, and to make our government less capable of holding private enterprise to account, and then people like you pretend that this is some kind of force of nature, like the weather, rather than the product of a series of conscious decisions being under taken by policy makers. The complaint here isn't that the government is failing to return us to some kind of mystical economic paradise from 40 years ago. The complaint is that the government has been actively participating in creating the conditions that you're pretending are some kind of natural and inescapable phenomenon. PT6A posted:Layoffs are unavoidable, though. That's not necessarily a terrible thing. The real problem, which you were so perilously close to correctly identifying before veering into leftist territory, is the lack of good-paying jobs so that people can establish stability while accounting for the fact that layoffs or career changes probably will happen a few times during your working life. The problem is you're apparently too stupid to recognise that precarious labour markets and low pay often come from the same basic problem, which is the structural advantages of capital over labour in the current job market. "We're going to have high turn over but high paying jobs" probably makes sense to somebody who works as a computer janitor but when you try to imagine that this will be the case for an actual janitor you sound exactly as stupid as you did when you declared that fenatyl was no big deal after trying it once in a hospital. People should at least be honest enough to admit that the current model being proposed by the Liberals is only going to benefit a narrow subset of the population. Unless you think we're about to replace most of the physical jobs in the economy overnight with automation then you need to explain how exactly you're going to design hyper precarious McJobs that somehow pay well enough to make up for their precariousness.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:46
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DariusLikewise posted:Worth nothing that both companies I've gotten severance from have also paid for 6 months of career counselling through Morneau Shepell as part of the package. Bill Moreau just introduced a bill to convert federally regulated pensions from defined benefit to a target contribution plan, something concocted during the conservative government. Bill morneaus company, of which he still owns 32 million in stock, is the largest administrator of these types of plans in the country and stands to benefit enormously from this. It really takes a lot of balls for a guy who got handed a multimillion dollar company on a silver platter from daddy to publicly tell people they should 'get used' to changing careers constantly and not having a stable job and oh also you're going to work to 100 because your pension is going to suck poo poo and I'm personally going to benefit even more from that.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:51
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You know, I could "get used" to employment being transient if it didn't affect my eligibility for food and shelter. #radicalism
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Oct 25, 2016 19:52
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sliderule posted:You know, I could "get used" to employment being transient if it didn't affect my eligibility for food and shelter. #radicalism
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Oct 25, 2016 19:54
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Helsing posted:Come on man, you're being as stupid as PT6A here. Of course most of these precarious jobs are going to be low-paying and lovely. Everyone here is perfectly aware of that and without major changes to the labour market there's no way to avoid it. Why are you soft peddling the obvious? I know plenty of people who've transitioned between different semi-skilled labour jobs, often without any qualifications beyond experience at other jobs and maybe a high school degree. Also, I'm actually planning to switch to away from white-collar poo poo and I'll probably take a big pay-cut for the first couple of years compared to what I could make continuing with software development. Or maybe I won't do it after all, and I'll move overseas and do some third thing I haven't even considered at the moment. I'd hate to be 100% certain about my future.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:54
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sliderule posted:You know, I could "get used" to employment being transient if it didn't affect my eligibility for food and shelter. #radicalism And of course it shouldn't. That's a reality we have to embrace, and we need to react accordingly instead of assigning companies the responsibility of taking care of an employee from the age of 20 to the end of their life and treating that as the ideal situation or some kind of goal to work toward.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:58
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Precarious employment for young people isn't a controlled change of a full-time job in order to move up the ladder and secure a better compensation. It's getting bounced around from one job to another with no warning and no guarantee of hours per week. If Trudeau and Morneau are accepting that reality and selling it now then they need to implement a minimum income policy for Canadians because every time someone has to unexpectedly change jobs, unless they are in the capital class, then they will likely fall behind on bills and have to take out usurious loans or worse end up homeless.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:02
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PT6A posted:I know plenty of people who've transitioned between different semi-skilled labour jobs, often without any qualifications beyond experience at other jobs and maybe a high school degree. You completely missed my point. In most industries, low job security and low pay stem from the same set of conditions -- employers with enough power to set low wages. Yes there will always be some lucky individuals who have good mental and physical health, no debts and no additional people that they need to support, and no strong ties keeping them in their current city. The fact you have some vague anecdotes about knowing a few people who fit that criteria is completely irrelevant to a discussion about what kind of labour market policy we want from the government. Are you genuinely incapable of forming any thought about the economy or about politics which isn't actually just an anecdote about yourself or someone you know?
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Oct 25, 2016 20:04
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The good news is that GMI talk has been catching on in a lot of Western countries The bad news is it looks like Canada will lag behind on it after starting the conversation on it (just like with weed!)
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Oct 25, 2016 20:06
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cowofwar posted:they need to implement a minimum income policy for Canadians because every time someone has to unexpectedly change jobs, unless they are in the capital class, then they will likely fall behind on bills and have to take out usurious loans or worse end up homeless. Yes this. The redesign of our social safety net should be around minimum income. CPP and EI and career training are things that worked in the old model but we need a new model.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:07
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Jordan7hm posted:Yes this. Agreed. I believe I've also argued for this several times in the past, which people tend to forget when it's convenient.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:09
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GMI is a technical fix for a fundamentally political problem. When one set of special interests (the credentialed 10% of top income earners, bankers, lawyers, managers, creditors, corporations) has the ear of government and another set of interests (the bottom 90% of income earners, pensioners, debtors, non-supervisory employees in most industries, etc.) are compeltely shut out of influence and have no effective political mechanisms or institutions with which to articulate or protect their own interests, then the result is going to be easy to predict. The groups with influence and power are going to keep getting more influential and powerful and the groups shut out of that arrangement are going to keep getting a raw deal. No single policy plank can fix what is at root not a policy issue but rather a fundamental power imbalance.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:11
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I know have a few friends who are in the recent not-stem-grad position, and the job churn majorly sucks, especially if you're unable to establish a life. Should many Canadians increasingly be unable to purchase property and start families, the country is going to be having a serious demographic issue in 20 years, and immigration won't alleviate this. This country is absolutely ripe for a very strong conservative shift in the coming decades, especially as people start to value stability/predictability a lot more, and new figures on the right get more adept at handling certain social/environmental issues in a non-terrible manner
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Oct 25, 2016 20:14
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Helsing posted:GMI is a technical fix for a fundamentally political problem. No, GMI is a fix for the fact that the ability to have a dignified life should not depend on employment. Should it really need to fix anything else? Once those things are decoupled, the balance of power between employers and employees, especially at the lowest end of the spectrum, will be shifted so radically that it almost seems pointless to dick around with other things until we see how things turn out.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:14
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But rich disruptive techbros told me the gig economy means we're not longer imprisoned in a crushing boring job for life, we now have the freedom to reinvent ourselves and experience a wide variety of jobs and locations throughout our lives. I don't understand why people are against this. I mean everyone's an in-demand six figure single tech worker right?
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Oct 25, 2016 20:19
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Baronjutter posted:But rich disruptive techbros told me the gig economy means we're not longer imprisoned in a crushing boring job for life, we now have the freedom to reinvent ourselves and experience a wide variety of jobs and locations throughout our lives. I don't understand why people are against this. I mean everyone's an in-demand six figure single tech worker right? Sarcasm doesn't become you. I'm looking at taking a massive paycut, like I already said, because I'm sick of working in this industry and I want a change, so, no, it's not all about doing white-collar work for six figures.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:24
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cowofwar posted:they need to implement a minimum income policy for Canadians because every time someone has to unexpectedly change jobs, unless they are in the capital class, then they will likely fall behind on bills and have to take out usurious loans or worse end up homeless.  Another idea I've been kicking around in my head that I'd love to see would be some sort of mandated disclosure of salary information within an organisation. Perhaps not with names attached, but position and salary. The disruption of equalising the employer-employee gap is one I could get behind.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:23
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PT6A posted:No, GMI is a fix for the fact that the ability to have a dignified life should not depend on employment. That's exactly the point. In the current political context no Canadian politician -- least of all a loving Liberal government where Bill Morneau is finance minister -- is going to wake up one day and decide to implement a policy that would "[radically shift] the balance of power between employers and employees, especially at the lowest end of the spectrum." It's the dumbest pipe dream imaginable. It's an impossibility that only get's brought up to deflect blame from the actual policies that the Liberal government is implementing, which are all continuations of Harper or Chretien / Martin era policies which have a demonstrated track record of shifting power away from workers and toward employers. There's a long historical track record we can examine here and if one thing stands out it's that governments don't just wake up one day and decide to upend labour market policy on behalf of the least powerful and least represented sections of society. The only way such a group gets a better deal is by organising itself and pressing its demands. And what the Liberals are proposing is a set of policies and initiatives that will make it far harder for these disadvantaged groups to actually press their demands forward.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:24
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It is weird to hear a knowledge based economy being used as way to avoid employment churn throughout your life, because have I some bad news for you. I am also planning for my child to become a doctor, or apocolyptic warlord.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:27
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Helsing posted:That's exactly the point. In the current political context no Canadian politician -- least of all a loving Liberal government where Bill Morneau is finance minister -- is going to wake up one day and decide to implement a policy that would "[radically shift] the balance of power between employers and employees, especially at the lowest end of the spectrum." It's the dumbest pipe dream imaginable. It's an impossibility that only get's brought up to deflect blame from the actual policies that the Liberal government is implementing, which are all continuations of Harper or Chretien / Martin era policies which have a demonstrated track record of shifting power away from workers and toward employers.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:31
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I swear to god this obsession with minimum incomes is only one step up from the people who show up around election time thinking Obama or Trudeau or whomever is going to solve everything just by getting elected. You need a more long term view. Policies like a minimum income are the expressions of the underlying political power relations within the society that implements the policy. We're not ruled by benevolent philosopher kings who are going to totally upend existing power structures just because we convinced them it would be a prudent move. If you want a GMI then first you need to have some political force in society strong enough to reward or punish politicians (especially since you can be guaranteed to face massive resistance from entrenched power centres). The Liberal party is never going to implement GMI in such a way that it would actually achieve the things people in this thread say they want it to achieve. At most we might get some butchered version which will inevitably be used as a justification to phase out unemployment insurance and other welfare state provisions, and I guarantee you that some clever political staffers or consultants will steer things in such a way that people end up more dependent than ever on their private market incomes rather than government transfers. I don't know how naive you'd have to be to think this government or any Liberal government in the near future would ever actually implement a labour market reform intended to massively increase the power of employees over their employers.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:33
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Although I agree that this government is garbage and will actually just continue the course with Harper (read:pro-business) policies. Has Trudeau actually restored any of the most offensive deregulatory changes like deprotection of waterways? cowofwar fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Oct 25, 2016 |
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Oct 25, 2016 20:33
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peter banana posted:What about innovation? You know, moving from a resources based economy to a knowledge economy? Did we try that one yet? Our knowledge creators are hard at work stockpiling millions of units of white guilt, any day now until it catches on in China. quote:Ah, the Canoe.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:34
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Postess with the Mostest posted:Ah, the Canoe. Jesus loving christ
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Oct 25, 2016 20:35
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cowofwar posted:Mincome could possibly be sold by getting rid of CPP, OAS and importantly EI and its employer-associated premiums. If companies no longer had to pay EI premiums and the financial burden was moved to the federal government with an increase in income taxes then it could be painted as a "job creator tax break". You're missing my point. You can't cheat and secretly smuggle a radically pro-worker policy into the agenda of a totally pro-business government, by adopting some clever marketing slogans. Even if you somehow succeeded they'd just recognise their mistake and they or the next government in power would change the policy. If you want a better deal for workers then they need to have more political power. There's no magical run-around to this. You're not going to somehow trick the government into screwing over it's most important special interest group. It has to be done in an up-front manner, by making credible demands that are backed up by an actual political threat.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:37
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Postess with the Mostest posted:Our knowledge creators are hard at work stockpiling millions of units of white guilt, any day now until it catches on in China.  They just keep finding ways to top themselves. Helsing posted:You're missing my point. You can't cheat and secretly smuggle a radically pro-worker policy into the agenda of a totally pro-business government, by adopting some clever marketing slogans. Even if you somehow succeeded they'd just recognise their mistake and they or the next government in power would change the policy. Isn't mincome good for business? You make sure people can actually buy your products, and by doing so, the economic engine keeps going, so your money retains value and you can actually do and buy things with your money. Losing your customer base for whatever reason, including poverty, is death to a business.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:41
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Brannock posted:Isn't mincome good for business? You make sure people can actually buy your products, and by doing so, the economic engine keeps going, so your money retains value and you can actually do and buy things with your money. Losing your customer base for whatever reason, including poverty, is death to a business. That depends on whether the business class is more concerned with accumulating wealth or with accumulating political and economic power.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:50
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Helsing I understand your point and recognize the need for organized labor at the table but I don't have an answer for how that could be achieved. I see mincome as more likely in Canada than a resurgence in organized labour and collective bargaining. Anheuser Busch InBev and Uber just ran its first shipment of budweiser in a driverless truck so one of the largest and reasonably well paid job markets is about to disappear. All these jobs and related incomes can't disappear without a commensurate effect on consumption and the economy. Right now we have a huge amount of debt being handed out to consumers to keep up consumption but that's also a terrible policy. The government needs to maintain consumption in light of a contracting labour market and I think for so long as we remain a democracy, the working poor will mount increasing pressure by virtue of their votes alone due to the relative decreasing number of upper class and middle class.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:52
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Minimum income is a response to a society that doesn't have job stability but still needs social stability. Its not incompatible with business or moneyed interests at all.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:52
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Jordan7hm posted:Minimum income is a response to a society that doesn't have job stability but still needs social stability. Its not incompatible with business or moneyed interests at all. How is your boss going to get you to work unpaid overtime if you're not afraid of starving if you lose your job?
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Oct 25, 2016 20:56
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cowofwar posted:If Trudeau and Morneau are accepting that reality and selling it now then they need to implement a minimum income policy for Canadians because every time someone has to unexpectedly change jobs, unless they are in the capital class, then they will likely fall behind on bills and have to take out usurious loans or worse end up homeless. Considering I have to apply for and justify my receipt of EI that I loving pay for if I lose my job (and not get it if I leave voluntarily even though I loving paid for it), I won't hold my breath,
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Oct 25, 2016 21:04
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Brannock posted:Isn't mincome good for business? You make sure people can actually buy your products, and by doing so, the economic engine keeps going, so your money retains value and you can actually do and buy things with your money. Losing your customer base for whatever reason, including poverty, is death to a business. Some businesses would benefit a lot from a situation where the precarious workers had a bit more spending money but not to the degree you seem to be suggesting, and they'd be sacrificing a lot of power in the process. Many other businesses seem to exist perfectly well within an environment of extreme inequality. So you're not wrong to suggest that some businesses would stand to benefit to at least a degree from a large redistribution of wealth. But the trade-off for that would be a lot of head aches: a more activist government, more independent workers, etc. Also keep in mind at higher levels managers and CEOs cycle constantly between different corporations and the 1% often sit on multiple boards of directors. You don't tend to have businessmen whose interests are exclusively tied up in a single industry. Sure the CEO of the dollar store might be happy to have a few more customers if not for the fact he'll be the CEO of a different company in a few years and all his friends and associates also work at different companies. Just look at the third world. As a rule, do businesses there tend to support redistributing wealth and raising peasants and factory workers out of poverty or do they tend to use every conceivable tool available to maintain high levels of economic inequality and political corruption? cowofwar posted:Helsing I understand your point and recognize the need for organized labor at the table but I don't have an answer for how that could be achieved. I see mincome as more likely in Canada than a resurgence in organized labour and collective bargaining. Massive reliance on debt is terrible for normal people but it's worked out fine for the 1% so far. I certainly don't see any evidence that anyone in a position of power has concluded we need to change things up dramatically in the wake of the 07-08 financial crisis or it's after shocks. At most we've seen a very mild reappraisal of the appropriate balance between fiscal and monetary policy, and this is in reaction to the worst economic catastrophe of the last 70 years. In fact the response to the crisis was perfectly engineered to save the people who mattered while leaving the fundamentals of our precarious, debt driven economy untouched. Even if we were to grant that in theory the debt driven economic paradigm we're working with is somehow hurting businesses or the wealthy there isn't much precedent for a ruling class simply choosing out of far-sighted concern to change it's fundamental policies. History is riddled with the ruins of old empires that collapsed because the ruling class clung to its old privileges rather than embrace any kind of reform. And by the way, the mounting pressure of the working poor right now is taking the form of votes for Brexit or Donald Trump. The institutions and worldviews that might have channeled the frustrations of the working poor were systematically dismantled and discredited by exactly the kind of liberal idiots who think class politics is no longer relevant. The result is that these resentments get channeled into authoritarian or nativist political movements. And rather than taking this as a warning sign of growing instability the ruling class is reacting by adopting a kind of shallow identity-politics driven liberalism in which they ignore women and minorities among the working poor and fixate on demonizing the white working class as racist and retrograde. So I guess it's possible at some point we'll see pseudo-fascists start winning elections. That might not be too far away in Europe at this rate. But again, there's not much evidence that this is forcing a reevaluation among contemporary liberals about their embrace of neoliberal economic policies. Jordan7hm posted:Minimum income is a response to a society that doesn't have job stability but still needs social stability. Its not incompatible with business or moneyed interests at all. Oh, well ok, if you say so.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:11
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Whiskey Sours posted:How is your boss going to get you to work unpaid overtime if you're not afraid of starving if you lose your job? Same way she does now, by promising future career progression that may or may not occur. Yes, mincome would obviously change how resources are allocated, but most people working 60 hour weeks with unpaid OT aren't doing it because it's this or the streets and giving them a safety net isn't going to change that calculation.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:11
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Helsing posted:And by the way, the mounting pressure of the working poor right now is taking the form of votes for Brexit or Donald Trump. The institutions and worldviews that might have channeled the frustrations of the working poor were systematically dismantled and discredited by exactly the kind of liberal idiots who think class politics is no longer relevant. The result is that these resentments get channeled into authoritarian or nativist political movements. Michael Moore had a pretty good monologue on that, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKeYbEOSqYc
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Oct 25, 2016 21:13
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Jordan7hm posted:Same way she does now, by promising future career progression that may or may not occur. I'm not sure this applies to low skilled workers in the service industry (the ones who would benefit most from mincome)
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Oct 25, 2016 21:30
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Whiskey Sours posted:I'm not sure this applies to low skilled workers in the service industry (the ones who would benefit most from mincome) I'm pretty sure unpaid OT is forbidden by law in those sorts of positions, no? Hourly employees must be paid overtime.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:33
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Whiskey Sours posted:I'm not sure this applies to low skilled workers in the service industry (the ones who would benefit most from mincome) These people aren't working unpaid OT. They're working 40 hours split between 2-3 jobs. The business would probably have to pay them more, probably by giving one person 40 hours instead of splitting it between multiple part time positions. There's no question some industries, particularly service based industries, would have to shift in response to a minimum income and that it would mean drastic changes for some. That doesn't mean it's anathema to business.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:40
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Mincome also has to make financial sense. Unemployed persons right now total 1,363,000. If we give those people $30,000 a year that's $41 billion right there. Now that's very quick and dirty back-of-the-napkin math but any basic income or mincome program is going to come with a hefty price tag. And it's not a simple switch out with EI because EI payments are relative to what you were earning so getting rid of EI to pay for mincome would hurt people who would end up with less on mincome than they would with EI.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:53
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Just read Morneau's comments, as a young person who also happens to work with his daddy's company I'd just like to vent and say gently caress him and gently caress the Liberals.
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Oct 25, 2016 22:04
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peter banana posted:Considering I have to apply for and justify my receipt of EI that I loving pay for if I lose my job (and not get it if I leave voluntarily even though I loving paid for it), I won't hold my breath, (Another reason we should replace EI with mincome or something.)
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Oct 25, 2016 22:07
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