Danny Cavanagh: Employers can keep whining about the CRB all they want. Workers deserve to be looked after by taxpayers just as employers received wage subsidies, rent programs, interest-free loans and the many other programs they received courtesy of us taxpayers.
Stacey Gomez: There are migrant workers who want to be vaccinated and who haven’t yet received their first dose. At the same time, there are migrant workers who are being pressured to get the vaccine. For this racialized workforce with precarious immigration status, vaccine access is an urgent issue of racial inequity that must be addressed.
Gus Reed on Bill 59, the legislation that sets out to make Nova Scotia equitable, inclusive and diverse. So far it’s been more empty words than substance, Gus believes. “That’s why we need a seat at the table, not a place at the take-out window.”
Last week journalist Stephen Wentzell sat down with Gary Burrill, the leader of the provincial NDP, to have a wide-ranging conversation about issues dear to the Nova Scotia Advocate’s heart, things like the climate crisis and the threat to biodiversity, the sale of Owls Head Provincial Park, poverty and social assistance, housing and rent control, healthcare and many other issues
Media release: The head of Nova Scotia’s largest health care union is calling on the Rankin government to take immediate action to address a dire staffing shortage affecting the Emergency Department (ED) at the Halifax Infirmary.
News brief: Nova Scotia’s health care workers have voted overwhelmingly in favour of a new collective agreement that includes annual wage increases into 2023 and contract language improvements. When the Statistics Canada estimated inflation rates over the period are taken into account most workers will be marginally less well off at the end of the contract.
Media release: Nova Scotia’s health care workers have voted to ratify a new collective agreement. Eighty-two (82) per cent of the members who voted cast their ballot to accept the agreement, which provides for reasonable wage increases in each of the three years it spans, as well as significant language improvements.
The NS Federation of Labour on PC leader Tim Houston’s ‘Better Paycheck Guarantee’: This plan is all about tax breaks and no mention of how to make up lost revenue and that its also an admission that higher paycheques bring on more spending but is silent on a higher minimum wage.
News release: Late Tuesday, a tentative agreement was reached between the Health Care Council of Unions (NSGEU, CUPE & Unifor) and Nova Scotia Health and IWK.
Lily Barraclough speaks with fellow activists about the mess we’re in, what Covid taught us about a just recovery and how to leverage the upcoming provincial election. “the pandemic has created an opening for massive systemic change,” she writes.