The American job market has utterly changed in the last decade. For starters there are many more jobs available than people to fill them. For another, job applicants are much fussier than they were a decade ago about what they will and will not put up with. Also unions are coming back as workers realize there is power in collective intention. And finally, America is no longer the world leader it once was.
Workers at work Credit: Harvard School of Public Health
A new piece of research has found 39% of employees who have been with a company for less than six months plan to leave within the next 12 months, a six point increase from last year.
With the new-job honeymoon phase well and truly over, employees are increasingly determined to make their voices heard when it comes to ensuring their workplace experience addresses their individual needs. They’re not prepared to hang around in jobs that aren’t working for them.
So why are American workers so unhappy that they are thinking about quitting so soon after starting?
Often it’s a case of finding out that the grass is not quite as green as they might have been led to believe.
That can be because the people who hired them are not the ones they end up working with, and the vague promises and commitments made during the recruitment process fail to materialize once they are in position.
Subtle reasons
It’s not that employers are breaching the terms of the employment contract––it’s more subtle than that.
The United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world and, particularly under criminal Trump and Republicans warehousing humans badly, became a big profit center for investors with no ethics or compassion. Biden made an initial effort to fix this, but it has not been entirely successful, so now other Democrats led by Senator Elizabeth Warren are trying to mend a final piece, as this report describes.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren Credit: Michael Brochstein / Sipa / AP
Almost three years ago, during his first week in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to stop renewing its contracts with private prison companies. The news was like a glimpse of blue sky for critics of the controversial sector—especially after four years of Donald Trump, who had fostered a cozy, mutuallylucrative relationship with the private prison industry.
The order restored an Obama-era policy first announced in 2016—and later suspended by Trump administration—after a damning federal report found that private federal prisons were less safe and less secure than their publicly run counterparts. No longer would the Bureau of Prisons sign deals with corporations to lock up people serving federal prison sentences. Nor would the US Marshals Service, in charge of detaining people while they await trial on federal criminal charges, enter or renew contracts with those same companies.
Or, at least, that was the idea. And over the last three years, the Bureau of Prisons has indeed ended its use of private prisons—moving the roughly 14,000 […]
I ran a report last August about Canada warning its citizens to be careful travelling, or not to travel at all, to the United States, particularly to Southern states. That warning is still in place, and other countries have issued similar warnings. In the eyes of the rest of the world we have become a dangerous, and rather nasty country that one visits only with caution. This stands in stark contrast to the desperate immigrants at our southern border.
OTTAWA, CANADA — It was a polite Canadian warning from a close friend and neighbor.
But Canada’s updated travel advisory to its citizens, counseling them to be careful about traveling to the United States, set off an international furor last summer.
The message renewed attention over the rightward shift in state-level policies governing abortion and the rights of LGBTQ+ people — a trend that has stirred deep concern in Canada, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
And the previously unreported back story behind the travel communique is even more revealing, exposing the delicate dance of a left-of-center Canadian government as it sought to navigate America’s incendiary cultural politics without imperiling the tightest of alliances.
The travel advisory that went viral was 71 days in the making. Correspondence shared with POLITICO through a freedom-of-information request reveals the change started with a concern raised by federal health department officials about Canadian travelers’ access to emergency care in an era of backsliding U.S. abortion rights.
The internal emails reveal Canada was aware it was an “outlier” among “most-like-minded” countries […]
While the U.S. has a large part of its population that wants and is planning on voting to make the country become a government of fascist authoritarianism, Canada is going in a very different direction and will be ending the sales of petroleum powered vehicles in just over a decade.
Traffic in Vancouver. Credit: Mark Woodbury / Flickr
Canada is reportedly planning to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.
Under the rules, to be unveiled Tuesday, electric or hydrogen-powered cars will account for 20 percent of new sales by 2026, 60 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Toronto Starhave learned.
A 2022 government analysis estimated the cost to drivers of such a phaseout, finding that Canadian car owners would pay an additional $24.5 billion over 25 years, largely reflecting the higher cost of EVs and the cost of installing in-home chargers. At the same time, the analysis found, car owners would save $33.9 billion on fuel.
The forthcoming rules mirror similar mandates abroad. China, South Korea, and the U.K. are all planning to phase out gas-powered cars by 2035, as are several U.S. states, including California, New York, and Massachusetts.
The new regulations will apply to automakers, not dealers, and are designed in part to ensure that manufacturers provide a robust supply of electric vehicles to Canadian drivers.
Rachel M. Cohen, Senior Reporter on Social Policy - Vox
Stephan:
Here is another report about Canada. The United States has the worst infant mortality and child care amongst the developed nations of the world. In Canada, again they are going in a very different direction, one that fosters wellbeing. Why is it that all the other developed democratic countries in the world seem to understand the importance of social policies that foster wellbeing, while the United States can’t seem to figure it out? The answer, in my opinion, is that America society has only one social priority greed and profit. We are becoming an historical tragedy.
Children in childcare playing together. Credit: Associated Press
A massive social policy experiment is unfolding in Canada to provide families throughout the country with child care for an average of $10 a day. The plan, which was introduced in 2021 amid the turmoil of the pandemic, aims to spend up to $30 billion Canadian by 2026 to bring down child care costs for parents and to create 250,000 new slots.
The federally backed effort brings Canada’s safety net closer to that of other Western democracies that have stepped up on child care, including Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, and Australia, and it could prove an inspiration to other countries whose systems still lag, like the United States.
Almost three years in, Canadian families are already seeing a significant drop in price, paying hundreds of dollars less for care each month than they were prior to 2021. Canada is making “solid progress in offering more affordable child care,” concluded a think tank report issued in October. Five of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories have already reached the $10-a-day […]
