Group items tagged

The forces of the Shift that surrounded the changing face of poverty really interested me. I saw these as being important to my future because of my keen interest in social justice. I can see my future work having to do with helping underprivileged people. This article provides an interest perspective on why the face of the poor is changing, even though between 2005 and 2010 nearly half a billion people escaped $1.25-a-day poverty.

With my keen interest in social justice, I thought this was a great article to end the year on. This article summarizes much of what I feel about poverty and social justice. Career counselling is very client focused, and poverty is a socially constructed issue, and often the barriers our clients face are external to themselves. At the end the author sites how we must work with the community to make meaningful change for our clients. This is of utmost importance to me.

An interesting current community and university partnership research project on precarious work and its impact on poverty in Ontario.

Some interesting information about the measurement of poverty using the HPI (Human Poverty Index), as well as low income measures in Canada.

Economics for everyone mentions the notion of poverty and what it means in reflection to the economy. I came across this article, it's a exerpt from a book that provides a different perspective on being poor and challenges what one may see as the 'social' of poverty.

This article relates to what Stanford says about the economic gender gap, at the end of Chapter 9. He mentions that poverty rates are especially high for single mothers and single female pensioners. (p.118) The article discusses some of the reasons why this poverty level exists in these two groups of women.

The site lists the minimum wage across Canada. Interesting that working full-time for minimum wage puts a single person below the poverty line.

An article reviewing the economic effects of outsourcing, measuring both goods and services, since 1963. It also discusses the impact on wages and the employment rate. I chose this article for this week based on the list of "Flatteners" Freidman described, both because they were included in his list and because it seems to me to be an important feature of globalization--that in the ruthless competition of capitalism, there will always be a value in inequality to create the cheapest sources of labour. This is something mentioned very early in the chapter (as related to the moderate poverty of the Soviet system) but I believe it's also important to think about when picturing a world that is increasingly connected and a playing field that seems equally leveled.

Salman Sakir's article is relevant to the issues raised in Friedman's book The World is Flat in which Friedman in a sense laments over the impact of globalization upon the developed countries, the USA for him, because the developing countries like Brazil and Asian countries like China and India have a massive work labour influence upon the West. Sakir focuses on both the positive and negative aspects of globalization, one of the five forces in Gratton's The Shift and a form of global economy as discussed by Stanford in his Economics for Everyone. Because of low wage and easy availability of experts/labour in the developing countries, foreign investments have been attracted by those Asian and developing countries where the jobs have been created for the locals. On the other hand, the citizens of the developed counters of the West and the North America have consumed the products from the developing countries in a reasonably lower price. Poverty ratio has been decreased in the developing countries which have also been integrated by the phenomenon of globalization. These are positive impacts. But in the developed countries, manufacturing industries have been moved out. so unemployment rate is ever increasing, Sakir highlights these aspects of globalization in this article.