Have they switched to TFWs there?

Can you share the firm or the union representing? I’m curious if it’s a viable place for me. 😄

In software?

That’s not what I meant in that paragraph. I am not saying that universities are merely job training facilities. That was simply an example from my life where these types of professionals have come out of. I’m not making a judgement on universities as a whole. They just so happen to produce the vast majority of software engineers and finance professionals in Canada. That’s why I mentioned the university. If I was talking about electricians, I’d have said trades school, or college, etc. I am absolutely aware of the larger role of universities and you won’t catch me claiming they’re professional training factories.

The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.

The numbers aren’t too high although it shows the market is no longer starved for grads.

It’s important to understand that this is a standard feature of the capitalist economy where the market is used to determine how many people are needed in a certain field at a point in time. It is not unusual that there’s no overarching plan for how many software engineers would be needed over the long term. The market has to go through a shortage phase, creating the effects in wages, unemployment, educational institutions and so on, in order to increase the production of software engineers. Then the market has to go through the oversupply phase creating the opposite effects on wages, unemployment and educational institutions in order to decrease the production of software engineers. The people who are affected by these swings are a necessary part of the ability for the market to compute the next state of this part of the economy. This is how it works. It uses real people and resources to do it. The less planning we do, the more people and resources have to go through the meat grinder in order to decide where the economy goes next. We don’t have to do it this way but that’s how it’s been decided for a while now.

I was doing my CS degree immediately after the 2008 meltdown. At the time there was a massive oversupply of finance people who graduated and couldn’t find work. This continued for years. I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn’t have an answer then and people around me couldn’t explain it either but many were asking the same question. I wish someone understood it the way I do now.

Carney firing Hajdu with a reference to this would send the right message and win him major points wirh labour. But it’s probably not gonna happen because he is either aligned with corporate interest (very likely), or has to play being aligned (very unlikey). I guess we’ll see how future labour disputes go.

I think that’s basically what happened. The givernment has chosen to keep the ambuguity of the rule which allows them to use it in future disputes, and get less organized unions to stand down.

In other words, Marx was right.

Google’s fucked.

The last approval I saw which was a week or two ago was over 50 percent. Don’t know how it’s moved since.

Yeah, UBI could probably make the minimum wage redundant.

Well they’re similar in some regards and different in others. Apart from the cons being actively harmful towards various marginalized groups, here’s how they might differ in handling this labour dispute. In the lib case, we have them going through the legal framework with the union and Air Canada, and they wanted force arbitration, which while not as good as the union could get would have likely produced meaningful improvements to the workers’ contract. A con like PP would have likely said that the union has been infiltrated by radical woke left lunatics and no longer serves the interests of the workers. He would have then singled out these workers as unreasonable and bad, and gone on to say how they are harming the rest of the good workers with their strike. Then he’d go hard on them in various ways. For example by emergency amending labour law to make it easy to bust the union, as well as others in the future, and to make it more difficult to organize in the first place. If he were extra nasty, he could have picked up some of the pro-Palestine messages said by various CUPE leaders and declare it/them supporters of terrorism or some shit like that and sanction them from that avenue as well. With this in mind, consider that the state can do a lot more to make life difficult for workers and while the libs aren’t doing nearly enough to avoid us descending into fascism, the cons under someone like PP won’t be afraid to use their power to increase labour exploitation at behest of their donors. Either way we need a strong, unapologetically worker-focused NDP but the libs aren’t nearly anti-worker as the PP cons would likely be.

Probably. Didn’t compute it but likely.

Except minimum wage doesn’t do that. In most scenarios, due to the persistent unemployment level, there’s a race to the bottom on wages which creates poverty wages for the “low skilled” labour, creating an underclass, with all inherent problems of that. Firms don’t have to compete for workers by increasing wages because there’s always unemployed workers looking for any job to avoid homelessness. This is how you get the working poor population in the US. The minimum wage puts a floor to this process. When the floor is above the poverty line, it eliminates the working poor population.

Besides, the minimum wage doesn’t stop firms from offering more to workers if they felt they didn’t get enough applications or skill.

It’s been a heavy weekend, but if there is a causre for celebration later today, I won’t say no.

Well most Canadians don’t want a new government and are happy with Carney. Us here just see the trend signs early and where they’re gonna lead ahead of time.

Yeah, basically. We did the lesser evil given the scenario at that point in time. Now we have to position the alternative to be in a viable state by the election. Failing that, it’ll be the lesser evil again.

Thatcher. Thatcher did. Allow privatization of public assets, allow free movement of capital, and you make it incredibly difficult to stop anyone around the world from acquiring any of your public assets and gain the power that follows.

And being allowed to be sold to investment firms. Which automatically means foreign ownership since most investment firms are multinational. And many of them have foreign government ownership, including Chinese, gulf, and until recently Russian.

From the CMHC link:

The “housing continuum,” now with benches in parks. Sadly they missed the sleep-prevention middle bar most park benches have these days.