NS Federation of Labour pres Danny Cavanagh: The province needs to ensure that all workers have access to paid sick leave, paid emergency days, and be paid a fair and decent wage. If workers contract the virus, they need a guarantee that they will automatically be entitled to workers’ compensation
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Press release: Some part-time workers who were laid off from their jobs are seeing a bigger paycheque than before the COVID-19 Pandemic. If you are an employer who had casual part-time workers, you need to ask yourself why your employees would rather be on CERB? Then ask yourself, as a small business owner, why should the big corporation be allowed to get tax dollars when many of them pay fewer taxes in Canada then you do? The system must change and workers deserve higher wages and full-time work with benefits.
“It’s always on our mind. Before I was redeployed somebody had tested positive at the call centre, and you think about it while at work. Then when you come home you worry about what you may have brought home.” Janitors do essential and dangerous work, but wages are very low and too often it’s all about doing more with fewer workers.
Statement by Equity Watch on the provincial government’s autocratic handling of the pandemic. “It seems clear that to this government workers, organizations and opposition politicians are to be seen but not heard. “
Free webinar”: How do we protect precarious workers. Presenter Darius Mirshahi.
Canada Post recently issued a stamp of Lawren Harris’ painting ‘Miners houses, Glace Bay’. Fiona McQuarrie writes about her personal connection and the painting’s significance in terms of Cape Breton labour history.
Press release: An overwhelming majority of Halifax residents believe that the Federal Government should provide $5 billion in emergency funding to public transit agencies. A poll conducted by Probe Research on behalf of Amalgamated Transit Union Canada found that 78% of people in Halifax strongly support or somewhat support federal funding for public transit operations.
Economic recovery cannot mean listening to the same old voices, the voices that led us to an economy with a widening income and gender gap, heightening rates of poverty and homelessness, increasing violence and inequality, poorly underfunded and inadequate public and community services, writes NS Federation of Labour president Danny Cavanagh.
Halifax Council had an opportunity to do something about the low wages paid by its contractors, and instead it chose to do nothing at all.
“The largest and one of the deadliest outbreaks of Covid-19 in a long-term care (LTC) facility in Canada is raising serious questions about how Nova Scotia’s government has handled the crisis – and whether ignoring early warnings from frontline workers and their unions had deadly consequences,” writes John McCracken.