What makes a "star recession-beater"?

It's natural for a paper to spin the news about the local economy in the most favourable way possible. Take this example from the London Free Press:

London emerged as a star recession-beater last month, posting the steepest unemployment drop among major Canadian cities.

The jobless rate in London- St. Thomas -- a region hammered by the downturn, with thousands of manufacturing job losses -- fell in November to 9.9% from 10.9%. The national unemployment rate also fell, to 8.5%, with the addition of 79,000 jobs.

Now the first thing that jumps out is the fact that London remains worse than the national average. This data seems to come from the same source as that presented in this article, so let's have a look at this in a bit more detail. From the map in the CBC article, here are the cities in which unemployment actually decreased (sorry about the lousy formatting):

City November October Decrease
Windsor 13.5% 13.7% 0.2%
London 9.9% 10.8% 0.9%
Toronto 9.5% 9.6% 0.1%
Sudbury 9.4% 10.1% 0.7%
Thunder Bay 8.5% 8.8% 0.3%
Hamilton 8.0% 8.4% 0.4%
Ottawa 5.8% 5.9% 0.1%
Montréal 9.1% 9.3% 0.2%
Trois-Rivières 8.9% 9.2% 0.3%
Saguenay 7.6% 7.8% 0.2%
Sherbrooke 5.7% 6.4% 0.7%
Gatineau 5.4% 5.48% 0.08%
Québec City 5.3% 5.4% 0.1%
Abbotsford 7.8% 8.0% 0.2%
Winnipeg 5.4% 5.8% 0.4%
Regina 4.9% 5.1% 0.2%

So while the Forest City may indeed be seeing some green shoots, they have some distance to go before they catch up with many other cities in Ontario, not to mention much of the rest of the country. To be fair, I haven't shown the cities where the rate has increased, but even some of those still have a lower unemployment rate than London. Vancouver, for instance, has an unemployment rate of 7.5%, up from 7.3% a month ago, but still pretty respectable, and better than the national average. And of course, as noted previously, the unemployment rate doesn't account for people who have given up trying.

Of course, if this should turn out to be a trend, this would indeed be excellent news for London, but it could just as easily be a blip.

On the farm workers' decertification vote

You may have heard about the migrant workers at a farm in Manitoba who first voted to unionize, then to decertify. Predictably, the usual spin by the MSM is that unions are no good for farm workers, blah blah blah. Interestingly, though, the Winnipeg Free Press (of all things) has published an opinion piece which puts a rather different light on things:

Recent media reports state that workers at Mayfair Farms in Portage La Prairie chose to decertify after the long struggle to unionize. What those reports don't talk about is the threats that workers received when they expressed interest in unionizing. At least one strong union supporter was denied return to Mayfair Farms this year.

The day before the decertification vote the Mexican consul -- which has a vested interest in keeping workers in Canada, as their remittances are a major source of national income -- held a closed-door meeting with workers at Mayfair Farms. Early this summer the Mexican consul visited all farms with seasonal agricultural workers in Manitoba letting workers know that should they unionize they would be blacklisted.

The lack of permanent status, the ever-present threat of being sent home, their isolation and their inability to communicate in either official language leave them among the most exploited of Canadian workers. Yet, they keep coming back.

As Diego explains; "I know I'm exploited here. At least if I work here my children eat. At home I'm exploited and my children don't eat."

Workers are keen to get as many hours as they can while they are in Canada -- up to 110 hours/week. A major gain for unionized workers had been the equal distribution of overtime hours. Without a union, in periods of work shortage, only those workers closest to the boss, such as crew foremen, would work overtime. With a union, overtime hours were shared equally. The union contract also ensured that workers who became sick were taken care of, instead of being sent home.

Unfortunately, the important gains that the unionized workers achieved were offset by the employer's decision to undermine the union by reducing the work week to a maximum of 70 hours. This sudden and arbitrary reduction in the work week meant that workers lost up to 30 per cent of their income, a move Mayfair Farms knew would be devastating to workers trying to send as much money as possible to their impoverished families. Clearly this was a very effective strategy in reducing union support. Now that the union has been decertified, workers are only protected by provincial legislation.

The CBC article linked to above is actually far more right wing in its spin than this piece. I find this a bit strange, given the accusations generally leveled at the CBC for having a "left wing bias".