Dead Birds

Bird flu, sectoral bargaining, climate disasters.

Note - You can read this as well as other posts on my page here.

Dead birds - No, not parrots, although I will share a link to that sketch. On a less humourous note, bird flu in the US is spreading, first to cattle, then to humans, and now back to cattle. Which means that the virus could keep circulating and mutating. This article refers to some issues:

Toothless guidelines, inadequate testing and long delays in releasing data — echoes of the missteps during the Covid-19 pandemic — have squandered opportunities for containing the outbreak, the experts said.

In related news, Trump has muzzled many US Health officials and their departments, promoting less conflicts with political opinions and more ‘balanced’ information. He also wants to appoint RFK Jr, who is not a vaccine supporter, as Health Secretary. And even if there are to be vaccines for this, many people are now conditioned by false information to mistrust them. False information that Facebook will no longer bother to fact-check. Seeds for another pandemic. We’re relatively safe here in Canada, but maybe we need a better border wall too.

Sectoral bargaining - The NDP supports this. I had to look it up first, to see what it was. FYI, it is where unionization happens by sector, for example all fast food employees or all garbage collectors become part of the same union and negotiate collectively with all employers. As opposed to what happens now, where different groups in the same sector could join different larger unions. This greatly increases the number of workers represented by unions and greatly increases the leverage of those workers with the potential of massive labour action. Many other countries also do this, here’s a good article.

This can improve salaries and working conditions for workers, a good thing, but the company (small business or mega-corp) now has increased labour costs to deal with on their balance sheet. They can just push up prices, an easy solution if there is a margin for it. They can develop more efficient internal processes - more widgets per worker. They can also automate processes - fewer workers. They can shut down a few plants less workers again. Or they can also also move everything to a cheaper country.

Here’s another article on this - do you support the idea?

Climate disasters collide - The Globe and Mail had an article recently on the overlapping of disasters. Basically a summary of some obvious things, we (as in politicians?) really should be worried about. There are no longer well-defined “seasons’ for fires, floods, etc, per region, so it’s harder to share resources. California should have been out of fire season last October and into the rainy season, but now they are warning of mudslides as the rain finally comes and hits those barren hills. “Heat domes” sit over our heads longer. Polar vortexes pop down for a visit more often. More extreme hurricanes, and an extended season. And, of course, it's harder to get insurance. Or sell your house - depending on where it is.

In the meantime, Trump is talking about overhauling the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Rather than using this arms-length agency to help everyone, he wants to make federal aid transactional. Basically, Republican states would get more support than those that back the Democrats. He’s already told California that their wildfire aid would come via the Republican National Committee and would be dependent on the state first overhauling some election laws and reversing some environmental policies. A signal sent to other states, of course. He had already blamed the wildfires on a state decision to turn some tap in the north and divert millions of gallons of water into the Pacific, to save some little fish nobody cares about, so that LA residents couldn’t even run lawn sprinklers, and so - wildfires. Not true, but it plays well in speeches.

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