Graham Cox is a labour union researcher at Unifor focusing on economic, bargaining, and policy in the energy, road, rail, and marine sectors.
Previous to Unifor, Graham was a researcher at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). At CUPE his work focused on economic and policy analysis for the anti-privatization, trade, post-secondary education, utilities, employment insurance, special projects, and organizing files.
Before working at CUPE, Graham served the student movement as National Researcher of the Canadian Federation of Students and chairperson of the National Graduate Caucus.
Graham has worked as a union organizer for the PSAC, CUPE, and the CFS with a focus on graduate student teaching assistant, research assistant and contingent academic staff union drives. This included leading drives to organize academic workers at the University of New Brunswick, UPEI, and Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Please also see articles under the author Editors (What’s left).
Productivity is dependent on not just the investment in research, but the implementation of new technologies that increased profitability. A new report from the Dallas Fed points out that there is a way a state can foster increases in productivity from new technological investment: funding federal industrial research programs. In Canada, we have not done this in a way to foster actual productivity gains.
In the war against climate change, the main issue continue to be resource allocation. It is not so much that we do not know how to solve the problems we have created for ourselves, it is that we cannot agree on how to spend the money or even if we have the money to spend. These questions are political, but the facts are rooted in our understanding of the economy and the processes that drive value creation. The politics tend to come out of how you answer the economic question of resource allocation and how you think those resources are created in the first place.
Regulations cannot be just words on paper and hopes that Risk Offices in corporations implement them. Regulating capital takes resources and those resources should be paid by capital and imposed by the state.
Just Transition is a concept of the state intervening when the private market fails at a scale that it cannot possibly respond in a reasonable time frame. That kind of thing happens all the time and it isn't just when climate policies are implemented.
The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) group of risk evaluations for companies is under constant attack from all sides. The framework for investing was an attempt just before the pandemic to push a more sustainable investment program while continuing to make higher returns. A cottage industry started-up supporting ESG and then everything changed.
The state should pick some winners. Canada is just picking the wrong ones when it comes to climate change.
Bank operations set real interest rates.
Universities are not widget factories. They are more like municipalities. Strike actions should match that reality.
As price inflation stays above the previous 30 year average, concerns about general price increases continue to shift from one consumer good to another. Right now, people are focused on food prices as food is so obviously getting more expensive month to month.
