Labour Market Policies in Denmark and Canada: Could Flexicurity be an Answer for Canadian Workers?

AbstractThe labour market in Canada is changing. Over the past decades there has been an increase in the number of precarious workers on short-term, part-time, contracts; jobs are created and lost, as employers deem necessary. As a result of these shifts in the organization of work, many workers are now forced to hold multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. This move away from long-term employment has created a situation where the majority of Canadian workers can no longer expect their employer to provide predictable support and security for them. At the same time, under the current Employment Insurance (EI) laws, they cannot expect support from the federal government either. How can workers gain some immediate protection through expanded social welfare programmes? With more and more workers, especially women, racialized workers and lower income people relegated to precarious employment, we must question current social policy. If, as it appears, EI does not work, we must strive to implement a viable alternative. Could an alternative system be modeled on the flexicurity system now in effect in Denmark? This paper draws on Nancy Fraser’s criteria for social justice for the globalized worker, to assess the ways that flexicurity could improve the security of the Canadian worker by offering alternatives to participation in the market nexus

Motherhood and Unemployment: Intersectional Experiences from Canada

Motherhood is central to women’s lived experiences. It affects women’s ability to integrate into the labour market, particularly the primary labour market, which has more secure and better-paying jobs. The Canadian government’s employment and childcare policies assume that women can actively choose when to enter the labour market. But women do not have free choice regarding either social reproduction or wage work. The insufficient federal childcare program (Little, 2004; Mikkonen & Raphael, 2010) along with work interruptions and job choices linked to childcare (Krahn, Lowe, & Huges, 2008) are barriers that push women toward precarious employment in the secondary labour market of low-paid, part-time, and temporary jobs. These policies leave few choices for women; only women in upper socioeconomic strata have adequate resources and choices related to their employment (Little, 2004). Employment challenges are compounded for women who have intersecting identities pertaining to factors like gender, motherhood, marital status, socioeconomic status, age, race, and immigrant status. This qualitative study uses an intersectional approach to explore the lived experiences of 26 unemployed women from diverse backgrounds in two Canadian cities and the challenges they face. The study found that neoliberal policies have resulted in a lack of  support for unemployed women with respect to Employment Insurance, health care, childcare, job training, and the labour market, leading to employment precarity and consequently inferior living conditions and jeopardized health, with a greater impact on mothers and women with specific intersecting identities. This paper proposes policy modifications to improve the situation of unemployed mothers.RésuméLa maternité joue un rôle important dans la vie de beaucoup de femmes. Elle peut avoir un impact important sur l’intégration du marché du travail , particulièrement le marché du travail principal, qui donne accès à des emplois mieux rémunérés et ayant une plus grande sécurité d’emploi. Les politiques de l’emploi et de la garde des enfants du gouvernement canadien présupposent que les femmes peuvent choisir quand elles intègrent le marché du travail. Cependant, le programme de garde des enfants fédéral inadéquat (Little, 2004; Mikkonen & Raphael, 2010), ainsi que les interruptions de travail, et les choix d’emploi reliés à la garde des enfants (Krahn, Lowe, & Huges, 2008), demeurent des obstacles qui poussent les femmes vers des emplois précaires offerts dans le secteur secondaire d’emploi : emplois temporaires, à temps partiel et à faible rémunération. Ces politiques donnent donc moins de choix pour beaucoup de femmes; seules les femmes appartenant à la strate socioéconomique élevée se trouvent avoir des ressources adéquates et des choix reliés à leur emploi (Little, 2004). Les enjeux reliés à l’emploi se trouvent être  exacerbés pour les femmes qui, de plus,  ont des identités multiples relatives au genre, à la maternité, à l’état civil, au statu socioéconomique, à l’âge, à la race, et au statu d’immigrante reçue. Cette étude qualitative utilise une approche intersectionelle pour explorer les expériences vécues de 26 femmes de diverses origines et sans emploi, dans deux villes canadiennes, afin de mettre en évidence les obstacles auxquels elles font face. Nous concluons que les politiques néolibérales ont eues comme résultat un manque de support pour les femmes sans emploi en ce qui a trait à l’assurance emploi, à la santé, à la garde des enfants, à la formation professionnelle, et au marché de travail. Ceci  a mené àla précarité d’emploi, et par conséquence,  à des conditions de vies inferieures et une santé compromis pour ces femmes. Le plus grand impact se trouve être pour les femmes ayant des identités multiples. Cet article suggère et défend des modifications aux politiques existantes afin d’améliorer la situation des mères sans emploi.Mots-clefs : maternité; travail; chômag

Alliance Building to Create Change: The Women's Movement and the 1982 CUPW Strike

Social movements are significant to change mainstream ideologies and values over what is seen to be critical for society. The women’s movement helped to change ideas about women and their roles in society . One significant change, for more universal maternity, only occurred through the alliance with CUPW. This paper will illustrate that the alliance between the women’s movement and CUPW was significant to change public opinion and help to gain paid maternity leave for the majority of working women in Canada. In sum, the power these two groups generated in alliance produced one of the most important social benefits we currently enjoy as Canadian citizens. As a result, alliances are powerful and should be used to further any movement to towards equality

Labour Market Policies in Denmark and Canada: Could Flexicurity be an Answer for Canadian Workers?

AbstractThe labour market in Canada is changing. Over the past decades there has been an increase in the number of precarious workers on short-term, part-time, contracts; jobs are created and lost, as employers deem necessary. As a result of these shifts in the organization of work, many workers are now forced to hold multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. This move away from long-term employment has created a situation where the majority of Canadian workers can no longer expect their employer to provide predictable support and security for them. At the same time, under the current Employment Insurance (EI) laws, they cannot expect support from the federal government either. How can workers gain some immediate protection through expanded social welfare programmes? With more and more workers, especially women, racialized workers and lower income people relegated to precarious employment, we must question current social policy. If, as it appears, EI does not work, we must strive to implement a viable alternative. Could an alternative system be modeled on the flexicurity system now in effect in Denmark? This paper draws on Nancy Fraser’s criteria for social justice for the globalized worker, to assess the ways that flexicurity could improve the security of the Canadian worker by offering alternatives to participation in the market nexus

Amino Acid Residues Contributing to Function of the Heteromeric Insect Olfactory Receptor Complex

Olfactory receptors (Ors) convert chemical signals—the binding of odors and pheromones—to electrical signals through the depolarization of olfactory sensory neurons. Vertebrates Ors are G-protein-coupled receptors, stimulated by odors to produce intracellular second messengers that gate ion channels. Insect Ors are a heteromultimeric complex of unknown stoichiometry of two seven transmembrane domain proteins with no sequence similarity to and the opposite membrane topology of G-protein-coupled receptors. The functional insect Or comprises an odor- or pheromone-specific Or subunit and the Orco co-receptor, which is highly conserved in all insect species. The insect Or-Orco complex has been proposed to function as a novel type of ligand-gated nonselective cation channel possibly modulated by G-proteins. However, the Or-Orco proteins lack homology to any known family of ion channel and lack known functional domains. Therefore, the mechanisms by which odors activate the Or-Orco complex and how ions permeate this complex remain unknown. To begin to address the relationship between Or-Orco structure and function, we performed site-directed mutagenesis of all 83 conserved Glu, Asp, or Tyr residues in the silkmoth BmOr-1-Orco pheromone receptor complex and measured functional properties of mutant channels expressed in Xenopus oocytes. 13 of 83 mutations in BmOr-1 and BmOrco altered the reversal potential and rectification index of the BmOr-1-Orco complex. Three of the 13 amino acids (D299 and E356 in BmOr-1 and Y464 in BmOrco) altered both current-voltage relationships and K+ selectivity. We introduced the homologous Orco Y464 residue into Drosophila Orco in vivo, and observed variable effects on spontaneous and evoked action potentials in olfactory neurons that depended on the particular Or-Orco complex examined. Our results provide evidence that a subset of conserved Glu, Asp and Tyr residues in both subunits are essential for channel activity of the heteromeric insect Or-Orco complex

Pretense and Imagination

Issues of pretense and imagination are of central interest to philosophers, psychologists, and researchers in allied fields. In this entry, we provide a roadmap of some of the central themes around which discussion has been focused. We begin with an overview of pretense, imagination, and the relationship between them. We then shift our attention to the four specific topics where the disciplines' research programs have intersected or where additional interactions could prove mutually beneficial: the psychological underpinnings of performing pretense and of recognizing pretense, the cognitive capacities involved in imaginative engagement with fictions, and the real-world impact of make-believe. In the final section, we discuss more briefly a number of other mental activities that arguably involve imagining, including counterfactual reasoning, delusions, and dreaming

Testing Simulation Theory with Cross-Modal Multivariate Classification of fMRI Data

The discovery of mirror neurons has suggested a potential neural basis for simulation and common coding theories of action perception, theories which propose that we understand other people's actions because perceiving their actions activates some of our neurons in much the same way as when we perform the actions. We propose testing this model directly in humans with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) by means of cross-modal classification. Cross-modal classification evaluates whether a classifier that has learned to separate stimuli in the sensory domain can also separate the stimuli in the motor domain. Successful classification provides support for simulation theories because it means that the fMRI signal, and presumably brain activity, is similar when perceiving and performing actions. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of the technique by showing that classifiers which have learned to discriminate whether a participant heard a hand or a mouth action, based on the activity patterns in the premotor cortex, can also determine, without additional training, whether the participant executed a hand or mouth action. This provides direct evidence that, while perceiving others' actions, (1) the pattern of activity in premotor voxels with sensory properties is a significant source of information regarding the nature of these actions, and (2) that this information shares a common code with motor execution

Early Social Cognition: Alternatives to Implicit Mindreading

According to the BD-model of mindreading, we primarily understand others in terms of beliefs and desires. In this article we review a number of objections against explicit versions of the BD-model, and discuss the prospects of using its implicit counterpart as an explanatory model of early emerging socio-cognitive abilities. Focusing on recent findings on so-called ‘implicit’ false belief understanding, we put forward a number of considerations against the adoption of an implicit BD-model. Finally, we explore a different way to make sense of implicit false belief understanding in terms of keeping track of affordances