Good timing for business grads: Fortune 100 companies plan to hire more this year

A promising job market awaits this year’s business school graduates with MBA and specialty master degrees, according to a new global survey. . . . “The big picture is very positive,” said Rob Hines, executive director of the Schulich School of Business Career Development Centre, in The Globe and Mail May 29. “I don’t think Canada will see a massive increase [in hiring], but for students who are looking globally there are tremendous opportunities.” Read full story.

Brian Mulroney to be named chairman of media and telecom giant Quebecor Inc.
York University law Professor Richard Leblanc says the payment to Quebecor’s outgoing chief executive officer Robert Dépatie is “anomalous” because compensation is designed to create an incentive for key executives to stay, not reward them for leaving voluntarily. “What it appears is they’re allowing him to resign for health reasons and they’re making him whole – and that’s not the point of compensation. The point of compensation is retention,” said Leblanc in The Globe and Mail May 29. Read full story.

Organizing precarious workers: Workers’ centres open their doors
The Workers’ Action Centre in Toronto was established in 2005, based on the workers’ centres that have proliferated across the United States.  “There are hundreds and hundreds of workers’ centres in the United States,” said York University Professor Stephanie Ross in Rabble.ca May 28. “What they tend to do is organize workers who have a shared ethnic or cultural backgrounds who are in a particular part of the labour market – very precarious.” Read full story.

Widespread TFW abuses revealed as industry group makes stunning assertion
Fay Faraday of York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School told the CBC foreign workers are unlikely to come forward with complaints because they fear losing their job and being sent back to their country of origin, reported The Huffington Post May 28. “To the extent that any of these processes depend on individual migrant workers coming forward and filing complaints, you’re dreaming in Technicolor if you think there’s going to be enforcement,” Faraday said. Read full story.

Goodbye Toronto, hello New York: #Berks2014 roundup and looking ahead to #2017
I can only imagine how the crew up at the University of Toronto and York University, led by Berkshire Conference President Franca Iacovetta, are feeling. In short? The Sixteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women was a crashing success, by any measure to which you might hold a conference, reported The Chronicle of Higher Education May 28. Read full story.

Ontario election: Okay, really – can politicians create jobs?
“These are political numbers. Their purpose is to convey a political message,” said Burkard Eberlein, associate professor of public policy at York University’s Schulich School of Business, in Global News May 23. “No serious academic would say, ‘I can predict that on a ten-year horizon this will result in X number of jobs.’ Nobody would do that because we simply can’t. It’s guesswork.” Read full story.

‘Turning over the stones’ to find small-cap gems
Douglas Cumming studies small-cap investing as part of his work as a professor and the Ontario Research Chair at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto. One difference between Canada and the United States he notes is the “significantly lower” listing standards on the TSX Venture Exchange than the TSX – and standards for both are significantly lower than the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange. On the other hand, Prof. Cumming has researched the rate of detected fraud in the two countries, and found it to be higher in the United States than in Canada, reported the Globe Advisor May 14. Read full story.