Lord have Percy I don’t even know where to start with this baffling story. Freshii, the Canadian-based fast-food chain, is experimenting with a “virtual cashier” system called “Percy” that allows it to hire cashiers in Nicaragua and pay them US$3.75/hour instead of minimum wage in Ontario which is $15 (US$11.70)Read More

I lost track of how many times participants in Tuesday’s “CBRM Forward” discussion used the words “excited” or “exciting.” Literally everyone who spoke was either excited to be there or excited at the prospect of overhauling the municipality’s planning strategy and land-use by-law or excited to be drafting an economicRead More

Stealing time Rubina Ahmed-Haq and I had an argument that devolved into shouting and foot-stamping on Monday morning, although the shouting and foot-stamping were all on my side and she has yet to realize we had a disagreement. Ahmed-Haq is the CBC radio workplace columnist who, according to her website,Read 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

Resigning woman Lucia MacIsaac resigned as board chair of the Port of Sydney Development Corporation last week prompting residents all over the CBRM to say, “Who?” MacIsaac has not been exactly high profile in her role but then, neither has the port board. In fact, the only thing I canRead 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 More

Fact Box On September 18, the Cape Breton Post carried a short article under the headline, “Payroll rebates for Cape Breton metal fabrication company.” The story — a reprint of a Nova Scotia Business Inc (NSBI) press release — explained that East Coast Metal Fabrication (2015) Inc (ECMF) had receivedRead More

Air Inverness I read an interesting Inverness airport-related story in Friday’s Chronicle Herald (but not, inexplicably, in Friday’s Cape Breton Post — although as a Post subscriber explained to me, “It will probably be in tomorrow”). It seems the Province of Nova Scotia is continuing to evaluate an application toRead...

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

Better than a poke in the eye Does anyone else find it funny that our globe-trotting, international port promoter may be, even as we speak, sitting in a tree in Florida? I’ve been following Albert Barbusci’s progress in taking over a bankrupt extreme adventure course in Hernando County, Florida, and thisRead More