(Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc’s fierce resistance to unionization, skepticism among workers that organizing could get them a better deal and decisions on election parameters all contributed to the apparently lopsided defeat of a labor drive at the company’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, people close to the events said.
In so far as participating in bourgeois democracy remains a component of socialist strategy in Canada, voters on the Left are largely limited electorally to the New Democratic Party (NDP). As with many western socialist and social democratic parties, however, the federal NDP has been following a steady course of neoliberalization over the past decades. The party’s commitment to the workers’ movement and its own foundational labour-centred principles have been jettisoned in favour of a far more moderate political project.
Last year was $8.2 billion less painful for 77 big fossil fuel companies, thanks to a tax bailout provision in a big pandemic stimulus bill.
The tax-law change did little, however, for nearly 60,000 workers those companies fired, leaving them stretching the $1,200 checks they received under the same law. Individuals were not eligible for the CARES Act loophole, which allows big polluters to reduce past taxes owed based on their recent yearly losses.
The only debt problem our government has in this time of immense national need (and extremely low borrowing cost) is that we're not incurring enough of it—for the right purposes.
Usually, the Powers That Be swat away the kind of big-ticket reforms our country needs by haughtily asserting a few hoary economic fables they dress up as immutable "truths."
"This is not nearly enough," the New York Democrat said of Biden's $2.26 trillion proposal.
With President Joe Biden expected to unveil the first part of his jobs and infrastructure plan from Pittsburgh later on Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is warning that the White House's $2.26 trillion proposal does not come close to meeting the scale of the unemployment, inequality, and climate crises facing the nation and world.
Jacinda Ardern says the changes to wages and benefits will help support the most vulnerable
New Zealand is raising its minimum wage to $20 an hour and increasing the top tax rate for the country’s highest earners to 39%.
The changes will be rolled out on Thursday, alongside small increases to unemployment and sickness benefits. The government estimates the minimum wage increase – a rise of $1.14 per hour – will affect up to 175,500 workers, and increase wages across the economy by $216m.
The cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline project by a new, climate-focused U.S. president is the latest major blow to Canada’s fossil fuel industry. But it’s no secret that even before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the economy, the sector was already reeling from falling demand and low global oil prices.
