This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The costs of a casual job are now outweighing any pay benefits — Joshua Healy and Daniel Nicholson: One in four Australian employees today is a casual worker. Among younger workers (15-24 year olds) the numbers are higher still: more than half of them are casuals. These jobs come without some of the benefits of permanent employment, such as paid annual holiday leave and sick leave. In exchange for giving up these entitlements, casual workers are supposed to receive a higher hourly rate of pay – known as a casual “loading”. But the costs of casual work are now outweighing the benefits in wages.
• 'The S-word': how young Americans fell in love with socialism — Chris McGreal in the Guardian: Americans who came of age during the cold war saw socialism being characterized as the close cousin of Soviet communism, and state-run healthcare as a first step to the gulags. There are still those attempting to keep the old scare stories alive. It was the old cold war warriors who helped detoxify socialism for younger Americans when the Tea Party and Fox News painted Obama – a president who recapitalised the banks without saving the homes of families in foreclosure – as a socialist for his relatively modest changes to the healthcare system. Then came Sanders.
• How Orwell used wartime rationing to argue for global justice — Bruce Robbins in Aeon: There could be no anti-fascist solidarity unless the exploited Indians could believe that a more just distribution of the world’s resources was possible – that global inequality could be changed. The popularity of rationing proved that, with the right incentive, the citizens of the more prosperous countries were willing to live on less. If this had happened in wartime, it might also happen in peacetime. There were other ways to divide the pie. No law of nature or economics pegged British consumption and Indian consumption at a 12-to-one ratio forever.