Documents McBride, Stephen 4 results

"Global warming is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the twenty-first century. Environmental polices on the one hand, and economic and labour market polices on the other, often exist in separate silos creating a dilemma that Work in a Warming World confronts. The world of work - goods, services, and resources - produces most of the greenhouse gases created by human activity. In engaging essays, contributors demonstrate how the world of work and the labour movement need to become involved in the struggle to slow global warming, and the ways in which environmental and economic policies need to be linked dynamically in order to effect positive change. Addressing the dichotomy of competing public policies in a Canadian context, Work in a Warming World presents ways of creating an effective response to global warming and key building blocks toward a national climate strategy."

"The fall-out from the economic and financial crisis of 2008 had profound implications for countries across the world, leading different states to determine the best approach to mitigating its effects. In The Austerity State, a group of established and emerging scholars tackles the question of why states continue to rely on policies that, on many levels, have failed.

After 2008, austerity policies were implemented in various countries, a fact the contributors link to the persistence of neoliberalism and its accepted wisdoms about crisis management. In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 collapse, governments and central banks appeared to adopt a Keynesian approach to salvaging the global economy. This perception is mistaken, the authors argue. The “austerian” analysis of the crisis is ahistorical and shifts the blame from the under-regulated private sector to public, or sovereign, debt for which public authorities are responsible.

The Austerity State provides a critical examination of the accepted discourse around austerity measures and explores the reasons behind its continued prevalence in the world."

"The existence of a low wage sector is nothing new, nor are efforts to resist the conditions experienced by people whose incomes typically fall below the poverty line. In recent decades, under the rubric of neoliberalism structural and political factors in many western states have combined to expand the low wage sector. In policy terms this is represented by intensified efforts to flexibilize the labour market and to impose conditionality for the receipt of social benefits. Various social and political forces have pushed for policies to address issues of low wages and poverty. The paper recognizes the intersection of social and labour market policies but focuses on the latter. It opens with an historical overview of efforts to address low wages that touches on sectoral councils in the U.K, and the Awards system in Australia. It then moves on to analyze contemporary minimum wage policy and campaigns for a living wage. We then turn to the discourses/argumentation associated with these initiatives, and those employed by opposition to them. Our goal is to understand and evaluate the arguments advanced but move beyond discourse to identify the conditions in which particular means of addressing low wages can succeed."

"This article analyses the documents released by the OECD at the end of May 2018 launching a revised Jobs Strategy. The analysis frames the new initiative in the context of the two previous Jobs Strategies of 1994 and 2006. We pose the general question of whether continuity or discontinuity is the prevailing theme, along with a specific question concerning the significance of new themes of job quality and inclusive growth, given the documents' simultaneous endorsement of the older theme of flexibility-enhancing policies to ensure a labour market functioning without rigidities. Flexibility had been the central feature of previous Jobs Strategies, although there was also a nod in the direction of an alternative route to better employment performance in the 2006 revision. The 2018 documents assert that the new strategy represents a significant departure from the previous iterations. This article provides a critical evaluation of this claim. "