Equality

An Interview with a Cat

- Adam Clare Leave a comment
cat

Those frisky felines are at it again! This time one of them is dishing out advice on how to improve your working life by communicating and acting with others. Jorts the cat is a Twitter celebrity that helps students understand their rights and workers understand theirs too. The key thing about the effectiveness of Jorts is not only that he’s a cat but that he communicates the struggle of modern American workers in a way that the average person can understand.

AG: In your year of public activism, you’ve been a source of information for many, especially around workers’ rights. Why is this important to you? 

JTC: Especially in the United States, many workers do not know their basic rights. For example, we have a legally protected right to talk about our wages, yet forbidding that is a widespread ‘policy’ in many workplaces. In truth, it is against the law to retaliate against workers for talking about their wages. 

Everyone needs to talk about their wages, because so often there are big discrepancies for no real reason. These gaps are especially large comparing white men to any other demographic. (If you’re a white man, you especially should talk about your wages.)

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10 Ways Jobs can be More Sustainable

- Adam Clare Leave a comment

Today is the day to celebrate workers. If you’re currently employed and don’t own the company you’re at then, congratulations, you’re a worker! We can thank worker movements of the past for weekends, health care, and many other improvements to our quality of life. In the coming decades we may add good environmentally friendly worker policies to that list. There are at least ten ways that we can support workers while also supporting a green economy for years to come.

5. Advance funding for skills development towards sustainable jobs. There is significantly more money in this bucket—more than $800 million over three years, all of it previously announced—mainly to support young people pursuing in-demand green careers. It’s smart policy and the package even includes direct job creation through 70,000 annual summer placements. It falls well short of the Youth Climate Corps championed by the Climate Emergency Unit, which would include two-year apprenticeships and in-depth training.

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Hop Aboard the Free Transit Movement

- Adam Clare Leave a comment
streetcar

Our contemporary financial approach to moving people around a city subsidizes individual automobile use, which leads to more car use and worse mobility for everyone. An easy solution to this problem that’s gaining popularity is to change what mode of transportation get subsidies. The most direct way to stop subsidizing cars is to make public transit truly public by not directly charging for it (and instead charge selfish transport solutions).

We’ve previously looked at how free transit also improves the economy (unlike cars).

The fare-free movement turns that funding model on its head. Advocates believe public transit, like other essential services, should have never been a user-pay system in the first place. After all, we aren’t charged a fee to drive down a city street, walk down a city sidewalk or sit in a city park. Our property taxes pay for those basic amenities.

As Montreal urban planner and social economy expert Jason Price, co-editor of the 2018 book Free Public Transit wrote: “We don’t pay for elevators, do we? And rightly so. The very idea is preposterous. Yet the public transit system plays the same role in the city, only sideways.”

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Thanks to Mike!

Radical Idea: Libraries

- Adam Clare
maps

If the idea of a library was purposed today it simply would be laughed out of existence because a library embodies an idea that is often ignored: that people, no matter their status, should be given a chance at no cost. In fact, libraries are free for all and generate no profit. What’s more they let people use the same shared resource over and over again – anathema in a post-Napster internet. Take a moment and marvel in the fact that despite the commodification and finalization of all aspects of our life that the simple library still stands.

The majesty of library buildings is matched only by the nobility of their purpose. The public library does not make anyone money; it does not understand its patrons as mere consumers, or as a revenue base. Instead, it aspires to encounter people as minds. The public library exists to grant access to information, to facilitate curiosity, education, and inquiry for their own sake. It is a place where the people can go to pursue their aspirations and their whims, to uncover histories or investigate new scientific discoveries.

And it is available, crucially, to everyone. It costs nothing to enter, nothing to borrow – in New York, and in many other cities, the public library system has even eliminated late fees. All the knowledge and artistry of its collection is available to the public at will, and it is a privilege made available, without prejudice, to rich and poor alike.

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Taxing the Ultra Wealthy Can Save the Planet

- Adam Clare

A wealth tax could be a way to not only address inequality, it’s also a way to reduce the damage done to the planet by greedy billionaires. Oxfam looked into the investments that the ultra rich hold and found that their investments alone do more damage to the planet than the entire nation of France. By introducing a wealth tax it would force the ultra wealthy to streamline their holdings and force them to think better about where they put their money. Let’s tax their obscene wealth and ban their private jets!

Researchers made the calculations by starting with a list of the 220 richest people in the world, according to the Bloomberg billionaire list from August 2022. They worked with a data provider to identify what percentage of each company was held by the billionaires and the scope 1 and 2 emissions of these corporations. The researchers used analysis by Bloomberg for detailed breakdowns of the sources of billionaire wealth to calculate what percentage of each company was owned by the billionaires. They excluded billionaires with less than a 10% share in a business. The research was limited because it was reliant on data that companies publish themselves, which is often not externally verified.

“Each of these billionaires would each have to circumnavigate the world almost 16m times in a private jet to create the same emissions,” the report said – adding that almost four million people would have to go vegan to offset the emissions of each of the billionaires.

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