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The economic crisis has revealed the extent to which sustaining the key tenets of the ‘Common Sense Revolution’, implemented by the Conservative government of Premier Mike Harris, have eroded the fiscal capacity of Ontario. The proposal to freeze public sector wages and the ensuing consultation with public sector unions and employers in the spring/summer of 2010 signal Ontario is about to return to the rollback neoliberalism that dominated the 1990s. The difference between now and then is the more defensive posture of organized labour and the limited capacities that exist to resist such an assault.
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Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Canada appeared to escape the austerity implemented elsewhere, but this was spin hiding the reality. A closer look reveals that the provinces--responsible for delivering essential public and social services such as education and healthcare--shouldered the burden. The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity examines public-sector austerity in the provinces and territories, specifically addressing how austerity was implemented, what forms austerity agendas took (from regressive taxes and new user fees to public-sector layoffs and privatization schemes), and what, if any, political responses resulted. Contributors focus on the period from 2007 to 2015, the global financial crisis and the period of fiscal consolidation that followed, while also providing a longer historical context--austerity is not a new phenomenon. A granular examination of each jurisdiction identifies how changing fiscal conditions have affected the delivery of public services and restructured public finances, highlighting the consequences such changes have had for public-sector workers and users of public services. The first book of its kind in Canada, The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity challenges conventional wisdom by showing that Canada did not escape post-crisis austerity, and that its recovery has been vastly overstated. -- Publisher's description
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The contemporary living wage movement emerged in the United States through the 1990s. It marked a particularly dramatic response at the local and regional level to the erosion in the quality of employment in the American labour market. In many respects it was and is today a rebellion of urban, racialized service sector workers. What is much less discussed are efforts to establish living wage policies in Canada. The Canadian living wage campaigns are much less movements than a strategy of rational policy advocacy. A variety of legal, political and ideological factors make this so. It is not a judgement but an observation meriting some greater interrogation.
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Analyzes the turbulent history of labour relations between public sector unions and provincial and federal governments since the 1970s. Summarizes the distinctive features of the neoliberal state as employer.
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Provides a critical assessment of labour's longstanding relationship with the NDP and makes the case that organized labour's own "culture of defensiveness" has helped to maintain its enduring links with the NDP, despite the party's diminishing interest in projects historically associated with social democracy. --Editor's introduction
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