corrente

On this Labor Day, while the Bush Administration looks benignly on falling wages and hacks away at overtime pay regulations, unemployment benefits and what remains of our progressive tax code, imagine an economy where workers can expect

One year paid parental leave;

Guranteed vacations;

Limits on overtime;

No at-will employment;

Guaranteed medical coverage

While maintaining a quality of life for its citizens that's second to none.

That world is right next door. I particularly liked this part:

Since Canada's employment laws already provide a higher floor than the United States, companies that want to attract the best workers or prevent unionization have to offer even more benefits. [25% of Canada's workforce is unionized, vs. 11% in the U.S. --TK]

Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada, for example, offers its employees an "income-protection program" to soften the blow in case of a layoff.

A midlevel executive who loses his job gets a minimum two months' severance pay, plus more depending on age and income. It's possible for a longtime employee to get up to a year's worth of severance.

Under wingnut doctrine that's the reigning American ideology today, such burdensome labor laws would not encourage worker-friendly competition between companies, but rather the opposite. Read the whole damn thing.

Of course no article about Canada would be complete without cautionary tales about relatively high taxes, which of course omits the cost of privatized health insurance on the U.S. side of of the ledger. Still, it is worth bearing in mind that

For the one-third of families in Canada and the United States with incomes of less than C$25,000 in 1997, average effective tax rates were the same or lower in Canada.

The largest difference (5.3 percentage points) in effective tax rates between the two countries was for families with incomes of $50,000 to $99,999.

Except for the lowest income group, effective tax rates varied more widely in Canada than in the United States.

The average effective tax rates in 1997 for families with incomes of $150,000 or more were 32.8% in Canada and 27.6% in the United States.

I expect that even that gap will close once the bills for Whistle Ass's shooting gallery in the Middle East come due.