Der NDP-Arbeitsplan von Avi Lewis ist ein bemerkenswertes Dokument

When you go over his plan, one has to wonder if Lewis or the NDP have a sufficient understanding of Canadian federalism to continue being a federal party. There’s also the problem immigration isn’t seen as a pro labour policy right now. The NDP and Lewis don’t look like a serious party when they put of platforms like this.

>**Expand Sectoral Bargaining**. Sectoral bargaining can make joining a union easier for precarious workers, raise workplace standards, and increase collective power.

How? The federal government is incredibly limited on in its ability to regulate labour. The federal government can regulate labour in areas of its own jurisdiction.

>**Champion single-step union certification** by fighting alongside the labour movement to make it the standard across the country. If a simple majority of workers in a workplace sign a union card, that should be enough to certify a union, ***as is the case in Manitoba.***

Again, how?!? Are they planning on simply having massive gaps in this policy’s coverage?

>Pass **Right of First Refusal legislation** giving workers the first chance to purchase their workplace when the boss walks away.

While nice, corporations are legally people, too. You can’t tell them who to sell to. This will get shutdown by a section 7 charter challenge.

>**Support Gig and Tech Workers.** Guarantee labour protections, collective bargaining rights, and fair wages for creators, platform workers, and digital labourers. This includes protections for freelance contracts, platform-based gig work, and remote digital labour. We’ll fight to introduce enforceable minimum standards for pay, benefits, and workplace safety in online and app-based work, and end the misclassification of gig workers as „independent contractors“ instead of employees.

Provinces are going to have first crack at regulating nearly all of this. Some of these locations might fall under a federally regulated sector, but not all of them will. Also, collective bargaining for Uber and Instacart drivers? I don’t understand this. A lot of these jobs are for solo contractors who don’t work with other employees. Regardless, a lot of this app-based work will disappear if you try and regulate it too much.

>Migrants staff our hospitals, harvest our food, and care for our children and elderly. Without them, essential services would collapse. Yet instead of giving these workers the rights and stability our parents and grandparents had when they first came here with permanent residency or citizenship on arrival

Most of them came when Canada had no Charter, no social safety net, and government provided no services to people. Bringing too many people in when we’ve been failing to fund these services will cause them to collapse, too. Healthcare is taking a beating across the country right now, for example.

>But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can give people the stability they need. We can end the exploitation that temporary immigration breeds. We can build a country with one set of rights for everyone.

>Many of us are struggling with unaffordable housing, impossible grocery prices, and services that don’t meet our needs. The problem isn’t too many immigrants. The problem is a system designed for corporate profits instead of building a country that works for all of us.

Almost no one sees immigration increases as a pro labour policy right now. It’s the opposite.

AI policy is disappointing. Too much focus on trying to curtail or stem AI usage. Imagine you’re concerned about the fate of workers in the 19th century industrial revolution, you can do two things:

– Ban industrial machinery in your country, thereby dooming your country to become an economic backwater with no industrial capacity.

– Control the industry yourself, piping the huge bounty towards national infrastructure and other quality of life improvements.

Say what you will about the character of China’s government but you cannot tell me their strategy has been ineffective. They may have ‚liberalized‘ their economy to some degree, but they effectively remain in control of these private companies and they channel the profits back into the state.

I’m speaking purely from the context of the left, because the economically liberal position is to let the market handle this. This is a left leader, ostensibly proposing left wing policy, and left wing policy leans towards more state involvement in the economy.

We have an emerging technology that will reshape the entire structure of our economy. Why be left behind when we can take the steering wheel and be the owners of all the profits?

I swear even on the left in this country the idea of state involvement in the economy is taboo. They’d rather just ban it than control it.