Oddly Enough, It Works. How to Cure the "Gig Economy."

He's possibly one of the greatest American public intellectuals you've never heard of: Gar Alperovitz. The social economist/historian is the author of "What Then Must We Do?" a title he lifted from Tolstoy.

What Then serves as an answer to our federal government's capitulation to a future of "job churn" for our descendants, the road to the precariat life of living from job to job, cheque to cheque, and trying to survive the gaps in between. The focus is on democratizing the economy in a non-confiscatory way by shifting the means of production from the ledgers of the rentier class into the hands of the working class.

Alperovitz demonstrates that some businesses fail because the owners treat it as a cash cow and neglect the challenges of management. When the business falters they may shut it down, take the write offs, and put the employees out onto the street.

In his book, the author provides examples of this very situation, companies about to fold, where the work force, aided and supported by the community - local businesses, banks, churches who also have a vested interest in keeping those jobs in the neighbourhood - buy the company from its indifferent owners and, working together, bring it back to profitability.  As owners, the employees not only ensure their job security, decent wages and benefits, but they also earn a return on their investment that can eclipse whatever they could get from a small savings account. As owners, the employees often demonstrate far better management of the business than the former, absentee owners. And remarkably, Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, have provided tax measures to facilitate this very process.

For those who find the Leap Manifesto too vague, Alperovitz has an alternative, a brochure entitled, "What Then Can I Do." If you still can't shake off the allure of Plutocracy and imagine yourself one day in its rarefied ranks, or you buy into the "job churn" crap as inevitable, this is probably not for you. However...

In today's Guardian there's an encouraging item about another response to the gig economy. It's the story of a British courier firm, DPD, that has offered its drivers the option of becoming "proper" employees, workers with benefits.

No more contracts for what looks remarkably like conventional work minus all the conventional benefits, unless that’s what drivers want. And no more insisting that people who wear your uniform, drive your liveried vans, and show up every day to help deliver your £100m annual profits don’t really work for you as such. What DPD has done allows us to test the gig economy’s own defence of its model, which is that some people genuinely do want to work this casually; that given a choice they’d prefer not to be tied down, to keep it as a side hustle or a halfway house between work and retirement rather than a proper job. Well, now they have that choice, let’s see what people make of it.

The catch – for there’s always a catch – is that those choosing the “worker” deal will be paid a lower rate per delivery than those on freelance conditions. But at least it’s clear to everyone what rights they’re signing away for the money, which was always the deal with genuine self-employment. And crucially, this case isn’t quite the outlier it seems. It’s part of a wave of small, hard-fought wins racked up by unions, activists and a broader swath of civil society over gig economy employers, which have shown that a race to the bottom is not inevitable; that companies make choices every day, and can be nudged into making better ones.

What does seem to be working ...is a pincer movement orchestrated by unions and activists, involving pressure from both the bottom up (the GMB led a driver walkout at DPD just before Christmas over threatened changes to conditions), and the top down, whether by taking test cases through the courts or lobbying the respectable high street names now tarnished by association with the couriers they employ. Do Marks & Spencer or John Lewis really want to be dragged into these scandals, to look complicit in such misery? If not, why don’t they use their clout as contractors to do something about it? The newly formed union the IWGB has used similar tactics to get several cycle courier companies to pay the London living wage.

These are all baby steps, easily reversed, taken by companies whose workers have had ample reason not to trust them. Nobody’s pretending everything is rosy. But small points of light in the darkness still matter, as they can be seen from a long way off. Even tiny victories can help to convince gig economy workers that they don’t have to sit back and take it, that the risk of being victimised if they organise should now at least be weighed up against the risk of being exploited if they don’t, that they aren’t as powerless as they think.

Neil Macdonald on Trudeau's Betrayal of the Canadian People

Political cowardice is something we're getting used to from our federal Liberal government.  Justin Trudeau may have a lovely smile but very, very weak knees. When it comes to taking bold steps demanded of true vision, he's usually a no-show. Can you say "electoral reform"? I know Justin cannot.

Then there's the problem of Canada's decaying, sometimes derelict infrastructure. That's everything from the electrical grid to sewer and water lines, roads and highways, air and sea ports, railway lines. Those are essential services. Without them our society would probably collapse within a week after the grocery store shelves fell empty.

We're now at that point where successive governments, federal and provincial, have kicked the problem down the road so long and so far that we've run out of road.  Governments have to dig deep to come up with the money to fix what can no longer be ignored but this is the age of "Everyday Low Taxes." Absent real leadership, tax increases can destroy political futures.

I recall Richard Nixon telling David Frost that the true test of political leadership was the ability of a leader to persuade the public to support a measure that was either painful or unpleasant. If you can't get them to swallow the bitter medicine, you're shite as a leader.  Which brings us back to Trudeau, the Liberal government and our major infrastructure problem. That problem, in four words, is "somebody has to pay."

The Trudeau government, in an act that marries cowardice with betrayal, has decided to let the public sector take over the government's own responsibilities. They call it PPP or Public-Private Participation. The private contractor builds, and essentially owns, the highway recovering its costs and a hefty profit directly from the public.

One of the grand lies that's endlessly told by the politicians perpetrating this cowardly dodge is that the private sector carries all the risk. That's why they get to lard their pockets with that extra profit. It's a nice story but history, especially recent history, reminds us that it's bullshit.

By recent history I mean last month's failure of British construction giant, Carillion. The Tories had done all sorts of PPP deals with Carillion - roads, hospitals, schools, prisons, you name it. It was all great until it wasn't. When Carillion went down, all that risk bounced straight back into the laps of the public - and the public purse. After all, someone has to pick up where the outsourcing contractor left off.

But Carillion, huge as it was, still was just a fluke, right? These things happen. They sure do, a lot. Since Carillion went down two more outsourcing contractors, Interserve and Capita,  hit the skids.



The recent collapse of Carillion, which had contracts with the government to provide services such as NHS cleaning, school dinners and prison maintenance, has intensified the spotlight on the sector.

Days after Carillion plunged into liquidation, the government was forced to deny that rival outsourcer Interserve was on the same path to oblivion, after it had been reported that it was on a watchlist of troubled companies.

Serco, one of the largest outsourcing players, has been struggling to regain its financial stability since a 2013 scandal when it overcharged the Home Office for electronic tagging of criminals.

Now Capita has become the latest in the sector to suffer a major setback as its new chief executive, Jon Lewis, “kitchen-sinked” an array of bad news by releasing it all at the same time. Shares in the firm tumbled 47.5% to a 15-year low after Lewis slashed profit forecasts, announced plans to tap the market for £700m of investment and suspended a dividend that was worth more than £200m to shareholders last year.

Some industry observers saw the writing on the wall for the outsourcing sector long ago. Tim Wainwright, an expert on outsourcing at global accountancy firm EY, said outsourcers have been squeezed by the need to provide services ever more cheaply, even as their costs have risen.

So now prime minister What, Me Worry? and his finance minister Bill Churn Baby, Churn Morneau want to drag Canada - and the Canadian public - down the same road traveled by Carillion, Interserve, Serco and Capita. There you go, problem solved.

The CBC's Neil Macdonald has apparently had enough of this PPP bullshit.

Bill Morneau, our federal finance minister, tells us the government's dodgy-sounding scheme to let private investors build and manage public infrastructure is a "win-win-win," as though such a thing exists.
...

Anyway, he must feel a bit of a fool. He's from Bay Street, and must know that in business, somebody usually gets the better end of a deal, and generally, the great white sharks of the business world — the huge institutional investors he's hoping will relieve the government of a traditional responsibility — eat very well indeed.

Trudeau is even promising the private sector zero or little risk.

According to information in documents obtained by the Canadian Press, the government is promising a healthy, guaranteed "revenue stream" for years. The exact return is not specified, but such investors tend to demand between 10 and 20 per cent – "equity-like return and bond-like risk," as the Wall Street aphorism so neatly puts it.

Best of all for the investors, according to the documents, the government is suggesting it might even chip in some extra cash to pad investors' returns. It's a path to heaven with no alternate route to hell.

And guess who will pay for all this? The cheery fog exhaled by Morneau and his fellow cabinet ministers isn't very specific about that, but there is ultimately only one bill-payer, and we all know who he, or she, is.

Shooting blindfolded. Not a real confidence builder.

Government documents suggest that the goal is to raise about $240 billion from investors over the next 12 years, for a total of $300 billion in spending.

But how the government arrived at that figure is a mystery. There has been no methodical assessment of what we need. Other countries have done that sort of homework. We haven't.

The government's own Economic Advisory Council complained about this lack of data, and finally just resorted to citing estimates between $150 billion and $1 trillion. That's quite a margin. Another authoritative study, the McKinsey Report, has said there's no need at all for additional infrastructure spending in Canada.

"Meaning we don't have a clue," says an assessment by Azfar Ali Khan and Randall Bartlett, economists at the University of Ottawa's Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy. "We don't even know what and where the investment needs are."

In any case, there are precisely no projects under way. At least none that we know of. So far, apparently, it's been a confidential, informal courtship of big-money investors — a dance with tightfisted, powerful people, all looking for the sweetest deal possible.

So, kids, prepare yourselves and your own kids and their kids for a potential multi-generational ass raping. Sort of like British Columbia's Fast Cat ferry fiasco only times a gazillion. 

Money + Politics = Support for Democracy

At least that's what finance minister, Bill Morneau, says whether he believes it or not.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau is continuing to defend his fundraising activities, arguing that people who attend political fundraisers are supporting the democratic process and keeping good people in politics.

"What's happening at those fundraisers is, people are saying we support the democratic process. [They're saying] we think it's important that we have good people that go into public life and if we don't support them, we don't get good people in public life," Morneau said.

"It doesn't in any way suggest that the people that are going to a fundraiser have any different sort of access."

So, do your patriotic duty. Support democracy. Be sure to buy a ticket to Bill's next fundraiser. Hell, buy an entire table. You'll be glad you did and so will Canada's democracy. Besides it'll take your mind off the "job churn" that Bill sees in store for the grandkids.

Trade, Trade, Trade

I recall an interview with prime minister Trudeau at the 6-month mark of his ascent to power. He told the interviewer that his overarching responsibility was to be an agent of trade. Trade to grow the economy. Trade to generate prosperity.

Trudeau's Harperesque pursuit of CETA and TPP demonstrates that he means business. This goes straight back to those mandate letters he issued to his freshly minted cabinet ministers as they were sworn in. Even Catherine McKenna's marching orders stipulate that her priorities are to be the economy and the environment. There's no doubt that she meant it when she said she was "as much an economic minister as an environmental minister."

Trade it is then. But, if you're going to make trade your priority, your dominant responsibility, then surely you have to accept full responsibility for the fallout from that pursuit. That's on you, Slick.

One element of that fallout is the rise of Canada's homegrown "precariat." It's a term used to describe the future this free-trading government has bequeathed to our youth. In case you're wondering, that's a future fraught with insecurity and economic peril.

Earlier this week, Trudeau finance minister, Bill Morneau, delivered the bad news telling Canadians that they would just have to get used to "job churn" - a future of intermittent employment and a constant scramble for the next job, that essential paycheque to meet the rent and heat the apartment.

Morneau defined his government's focus will be to train and retrain and retrain regularly laid off Canadians as they're tossed "from job to job to job."

What Morneau avoided was any mention of why he's consigned Canada's most vulnerable to a nomadic working life, always wondering when the current job will end and where they'll find the next temporary spot, how long it will take to find and how they'll avoid falling through the floorboards when that inevitable dislocation happens again and again and again.

Morneau won't mention how his own government and its predecessors laid the foundation for this upheaval and uncertainty through its obsessive pursuit of neoliberalism and global free trade, the constant downward spiral. He won't explain why, when even the World Bank and International Monetary Fund can no longer remain silent on the social and economic damage inflicted by globalism, his government remains a faithful adherent to this toxic ideology.

I'm sorry Morneau and you too, Trudeau, but, when you tell Canadians to forego their hopes and resign themselves to a future in the precariat, what you're really telling them is that you won't change course and liberal democracy be damned.

It wasn't always this way. Here are a few observations from two real American Idols - Lincoln and T. Roosevelt.

Let's begin with Abraham Lincoln who declared:

“I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind.”

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

If it is, indeed, man's duty "to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind," how is he to do that when his government consigns him to the precariat and tells him to "get used to it"?

If Labour is "the superior of capital" how is it that your government chooses to stack the deck so that capital prevails at the direct cost and damage to labour and our society?

Now let's turn to Teddy Roosevelt who observed:

"In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows."

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth."

"Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled."

"There is a wide-spread belief among our people that, under the methods of making tariffs which have hitherto obtained, the special interests are too influential. Probably this is true of both the big special interests and the little special interests. These methods have put a premium on selfishness, and, naturally, the selfish big interests have gotten more than their smaller, though equally selfish, brothers. The duty of Congress is to provide a method by which the interest of the whole people shall be all that receives consideration."

"Of conservation I shall speak more at length elsewhere. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation."

"Now, with the water power, with the forests, with the mines, we are brought face to face with the fact that there are many people who will go with us in conserving the resources only if they are to be allowed to exploit them for their benefit. That is one of the fundamental reasons why the special interests should be driven out of politics. Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part."

"The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good. The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare. Understand what I say there. Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him. No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life by which we surround them."

"The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so long as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. Just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs, — but, first of all, sound in their home, and the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well, — just so far, and no farther, we may count our civilization a success."

Now, I know these passages carry a certain homespun-ness that can seem awkward but I dare you to tell me - whether you're a Conservative, New Democrat, Liberal or Green - would you really prefer a government that doesn't embrace every one of these principles? What would you give to have a government that did, a genuinely progressive party?

Climate change is, or should be, a non-partisan issue. It's the ultimate scientific question spanning the gamut of Earth sciences - geology, climatology, atmospherics and meteorology, hydrology and oceanography, physics, agronomy, epidemiology, on and on and on. Those disciplines are all separate voices. They have their own scientific focus, their own scientific history, and they each test the "hypothesis" against the best research, analysis and knowledge of their own discipline. Discipline, by discipline, by discipline - without exception - they have all tested the theory of climate change against their own strictures and found in that ever more corroboration.

Progressivism, like climate change, can and should be a non-partisan issue. You shouldn't have to be a Conservative or Liberal or, even, New Democrat to reach out and grab these precepts and notions. Even Edmund Burke wrote of matters progressive.

And so how do our Latter Day Liberals and Conservatives justify so abandoning the Canadian people and, especially, our younger generations? Who elected them to give the future the finger?

This, of course, brings us back to Morneau's finger to young and future Canadians to just "suck it up." If you were one of those kids, you might look at us and the governments we imposed on them as truly predatory acts.

I can only defend some of what we've done by claiming "we didn't know." We really didn't know the scope or the nature or the self-destructive qualities of neoliberalism. But we've had our eyes opened now,  at least other than those who chose to turn their heads, and we don't have any excuse to keep tolerating the Morneau's and the Trudeau's and Harper's of this world who see no obligation to ensure the Canada bequeathed to our young and future generations won't be a much degraded remnant of the country we have exploited for our ease and comfort.

It's not unfair to say that Morneau's dystopian vision is, in a word, revolting. That's "revolting" as in justifying resistance, civil disobedience, perhaps even upheaval. If this government isn't leaving our young people and generations to come the best possible future it can provide, if it isn't even attempting to fix this crisis of our own making, why should any young person accept it? Why should they find any legitimacy in such a government?

If I stumbled across an act of civil disobedience underway today, I would be very tempted just to look the other way. This form of governance is not legitimate to me either.