Marjorie Griffin Cohen

Training and equity initiatives on the British Columbia Vancouver Island highway project: A model for large-scale construction projects

The equity initiatives in training and hiring on this large project were unique and stunningly successful. At peak production periods the equity hires constituted more than 20 percent of the workforce, a figure that is ten times higher than normal. This project was the first time a significant effort had been made to integrate women and First Nations in a commercial highway project. It was accomplished through two risk- taking and innovative measures. One was a priority for equity hires in the collective agreement and the other was the establishment of a training site where women and First Nations (mostly male) built a section of the highway as part of the training process. This article examines these fea tures and the experiences of the workers, contractors, and trade unions with the equity initiatives. It pays particular attention to the construction industry workplace culture and how this affects training for equity groups.

Global Instability: Uncertainty and New Visions in Political Economy

Unprecedented levels of instability and uncertainty have been generated by the complexity of events and trends in the contemporary global political economy. To a large extent, at the crux of this instability is the growing political salience of various forces and activities that appear to transcend and impinge not only upon existing political boundaries and forms of economic production and distribution, but also on the values that underpin social institutions and existing modes of social and cultural differentiation. These activities include, but are not limited to, the phenomenal growth in global trade and private capital flows, increased pressures for financial liberalization and the growing instability of national currencies, increased cross-border flows of people and ideas, and the growth of transnational social movements as well as in various illicit activities associated with transnational organized crime.

Assessing BC Electricity Policy Since 2002 and the Government's 2011 Review of BC Hydro

British Columbia’s electricity system was restructured through a series of changes that began in minor ways during the last decade of the twentieth century and carried on in much more significant ways in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Major changes increasing the role of the private sector in the generation of electricity in British Columbia paralleled changes in electricity systems introduced in many developed nations, beginning with Britain’s dramatic privatization of its state-owned system under the Margaret Thatcher government.1 Restructuring took different forms in different countries, but it usually involved some aspect of electricity privatization. This occurred through selling off public utilities, through encouraging private market-based activities in order to increase competition in the sector, or through deregulating private, regulated monopolies and restructuring the fundamental characteristics of the entire system (as occurred in the United States).2 Canada’s electricity restructuring happened partially because electricity-exporting provinces were interested in expanding their markets in the United States. The US energy regulator, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (ferc), made rules to encourage competition in electricity generation and indicated that these rules would also apply to Canadian utilities exporting to the United States. It was this initiative, coupled with the demands of the private sector to reduce the monopoly aspects of the country’s public utilities, that led Canada’s electricity-

Rethinking Global Strategies

The APEC Conference in Vancouver in November 1997 witnessed considerable political drama. This centred on the conflict between the Prime Minister’s Office and student demonstrators, the federal government’s attempts to discredit and control the media reporting on the events, and the subsequent unsatisfactory investigation of the infringement on citizens’ rights. While the legal problems of Prime Minister Jean Chretien and CBC reporter Terry Milewski have taken the spotlight in post-APEC news, another drama associated with APEC deserves attention. Tensions arose among popular sector groups in the pre-APEC period over strategies opposing international agreements such as the FTAA and the MAI.

Gender and Climate Change Financing: Coming Out of the Margin

Making gendered issues visible in any area of public policy is difficult, but dealing with major systemic issues like climate change presents particularly acute challenges. The overarching problem is that global policy to deal with climate change itself is woefully inadequate, and this deficiency, plus the habitual gender blindness inherent in the way that systemic problems are treated, means that women are simply not part of the picture. The impact of climate change on women in developing countries is not a new issue, and quite a bit has been known for some time. Still, this has not translated into vigorous attempts to include women in measures to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. As Mariama Williams argues in this book, the invisibility of women in the design of climate change policies keeps women from being part of the solutions, and the problems with the ways solutions are designed and implemented serve to further increase gender inequalities. While the unfairness of it is blatant, this gender blindness inhibits effective climate change policies as well. Williams is the ideal person to examine these issues. She is an economist well known for her analyses of international approaches to gender in developing nations and on gender and trade agreements. As is characteristic of her previous work, she brings both analytical insights and detailed, in-depth information to the character and methods of international climate change finance. Without adequate financing for climate change initiatives, there is no effective help to those in the world who are most vulnerable to the extreme weather events it brings. As Williams points out, climate change has different implications for developing countries, although it is a gendered issue everywhere because societies are so highly structured along gendered lines. But, developing nations deserve the spotlight. According to Williams, 95 percent of the deaths from climate change occur in these countries, and women and girls are fourteen times more likely to die from natural disasters than are men. The architecture of climate change finance is complex and involves many levels of governments and the private sector all over the world, but at the core, setting the principles and establishing funding commitments, is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This convention, based on principles of both equity and of polluter pay, establishes the obligations of rich countries (the heavy polluters) to developing nations. Williams shows that the estimated collective promise of US

An Engagement With The Making of Global Capitalism

10 billion per year in voluntary contributions is both inadequate and unmet. Vastly greater sums are actually needed, and so too is the redesign of finance priorities for action.

The Paper Boom and the Left

The book The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Emprie by Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch is unique on several grounds, not least of which is the singularity of two Marxist Canadians undertaking a serious analysis of US economic history. But also significant is its work in analyzing the role of the US state in the construction of the global system where finance capitalism dominates. When the book first came out last fall, I happened to be in New York City walking through Grand Central Station’s bookstore, where this book was the most prominent on display. Having anything by a Canadian (other than novelists like Atwood and Ondaatje) as a leading exhibit in NYC is highly unusual. For any American who was tempted to buy the book, the clues were certainly there that this is an outsider’s critique — mainly because of the use in the title of words like “capitalism” and “empire.” These words are sure signs that this is a Marxist analysis, which is even less welcome in the United States than here in Canada. This isn’t to say, however, that much of the analysis in the book would be unfamiliar to many Americans. As I was reading the first few sections, some aspects confirmed things I had been taught throughout my education in economics in the United States. The major message then was that the United States is the biggest, strongest country in the world, and after WWII it was the only one capable of preventing the world from falling into postwar economic chaos and the political disaster of communism. It was also considered only natural that the United States should export all of the trappings of the American good life throughout the world, including not only the tenets of an economic system, but also ideas of democracy and a liberal social system. The Americans have been conscious of what was needed

Women's Work, Markets and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario

When I first studied Economics as an undergraduate student, we were taught to revere Keynesian economics and to reject the straight jacket of the classical system. Even as an undergraduate I struggled with some of the logic of Keynesianism. My professor told a story (probably apocryphal) of how when Keynes was approached by the head of a railroad about his problem of a dramatic reduction in riders, Keynes told him to build another railroad. We were expected to be confused, and then to understand (after careful teaching) that demand could be stimulated by increases in spending, any kind of spending. This would get people working and, in turn, spending on consumer goods, and this new spending would increase the expectations of businessmen who would then be optimistic enough to expand investment activity.

Women's Paid Work: The North American and Western European Experience

In this study Marjorie Griffin Cohen argues that in research into Ontarios economic history the emphasis on market activity has obscured the most prevalent type of productive relations in the staple-exporting economy - the patriarchal relations of production within the family economy. Cohen focuses on the productive relations in the family and the significance of womens labour to the process of capital accumulation in both the capitalist sphere and independent commodity production. She shows that while the family economy was based on the mutual dependence of male and female labour, there was not equality in productive relations. The male ownership of capital in the context of the family economy had significant implications for the control over female labour. Among countries which experience industrial development, there are common patterns in the impact of change on womens work; there are also significant differences. One of the most important of these is the fact that economic development did not result in womens labour being withdrawn from the social sphere of production. Rather, economic growth has steadily brought womens productive efforts more directly into the market sphere. In exploring the roots of this development Cohen adds a new dimension to the study of womens labour history.

Women's work, markets, and economic development in nineteenth-century Ontario

Ronnie Steinberg Ralner, ed. Equal Employment Policy for Women: Strategies for Implementation in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1980) Ann Foote Cahn, ed. Women in the U.S. Labour Force (New York: Praeger 1979). Judith A. Baer, The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Womens Labor Legislation (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press 1978). Carol Tropp Schreiber, Changing Places: Men and Women in Transitional Occupations (Cambridge, Ma.: The MIT Press 1979).