It’s toady time! I confess: I find Anthony Marlowe — CEO of MCI, savior of the Sydney Call Centre — fascinating. So much so that whenever things are slow, or I’m in need of distraction, I tune in to his Twitter stream to see what he’s been getting up to.Read More

MAGAA So, this happened: “Make America Great Again, Again?” In case you’ve forgotten, that’s Anthony Marlowe, the Iowa businessman who bought the Sydney Call Centre in 2019. Julia Marlowe is his wife, who has been appointed deputy White House liaison in the US General Services Administration (GSA). Here’s a descriptionRead...

So you have to stay home from work. What that will look like for you, financially, depends on a number of factors. As I write this, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just announced a whopping $82 billion aid package — $27 billion in emergency aid and $55 billion inRead More

As you have probably divined, the item of greatest interest to me on yesterday’s council agenda was the request to extend Harbour Royale Development Ltd’s waterfront development agreement and thereby, its role in developing the proposed new CBRM central library, but there were other items on the agenda that IRead More

Snowing on our parade The fall-out over the CBRM’s decision to cancel night parades continues to land — most recently on the editorial pages of the Cape Breton Post where District 12 Councilor Jim MacLeod published a mea culpa on Wednesday for remarks he’d made to CTV news in November.Read More

Boys’ night out Here’s the actual social note about that Cape Breton Regional Hospital Foundation “reception” Mayor Cecil Clarke co-hosted with Cape Breton Eagles owner Irwin Simon in Toronto on Wednesday. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I feel like there’s something missing from this photo: AccordingRead More

This is a quick follow-up to my October 30 articles about stress and call center jobs, the first of which was basically a review of On the Clock, What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, by Philadelphia-based journalist Emily Guendelsberger, who took three low-wage jobsRead More

I was listening to Intercepted, a podcast from The Intercept news outlet, on Wednesday and heard an interview with Emily Guendelsberger, a Philadelphia-based journalist who has written a book called  On the Clock, What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. The interviewer, Jeremy Scahill, explainedRead...

Earlier this year, acting on a tip that ambulances were being called quite frequently to what is now known as the Sydney Call Centre (although for most of the period for which I requested figures, it was the ServiCom call center), I FOIPOPed the Nova Scotia Department of Health toRead More

I was listening to an interview with businessman Andrew Yang, one of the many Democratic presidential candidates in the US, during which he listed the jobs he felt were most vulnerable to automation in the near future (it was part the case he was making for a basic annual income).Read More