The Canada Student Service Grant pays students less than minimum wage and strips them of basic employment protections. Doing this may well be illegal, writes Lisa Cameron, and it’most certainly sends the wrong message about student labour.
“We’ve seen migrant workers being impacted by COVID-19 from coast to coast, and that highlights that this is a systemic issue. It’s not a coincidence that so many migrant workers are becoming ill.” We speak with Stacey Gomez of No One Is Illegal – Halifax/K’jipuktuk about migrant workers in Nova Scotia, their exposure to both Covid-19 and xenophobia, and what the province should do.
Historian David Frank on Miners’ Houses, the painting of a Glace Bay townscape by Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris, now on a stamp. Harris visited Glace Bay in 1925, the same year striking miner William Davis was shot by company police. “Glace Bay is really no town, but a number of huddles of box-like houses around scattered coal mine mouths. . . . It’s drab and dreary and bedraggled even on a sunny day . . . “, Harris wrote at the time.
Saturday, July 4th marks the cross-Canada Day of Action for Status for All, with events taking place in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. As part of these actions, the migrant justice group No One is Illegal – Halifax/K’jipuktuk (NOII-Hfx) has launched a local poster campaign calling for full immigration status, as well as access to public healthcare for all migrants.
“Several African Nova Scotian HRM employees I spoke with compare their working conditions to the working conditions in the Southern United States of the 1950’s,” writes Raymond Sheppard. “In my humble opinion HRM has been singing the diversity song without learning the dance that goes along with it.”
What’s open, what’s closed, who cares? Will you get paid, and does your boss know, that’s what matters.
Imagine waking up for work realizing that what you do today is worth less than yesterday. Stephen Wentzell reports on a rally the Quinpool Road Superstore in support of Loblaw and Sobeys grocery store workers across the country who have seen their wages clawed back 15% despite remaining on the front lines of a pandemic.
Please attend a one-hour rally to protest Superstore and Sobey’s cutting their front-line workers’ 15% “hero pay”
Migrant workers and our communities are mourning the death of 55-year old Juan López Chaparro, who worked at Scotlynn Farm in Norfolk County, who passed away on Saturday, June 20, 2020, while hospitalized for COVID-19.
Enrollment in recently reopened child care centres is often not meeting the threshold necessary for operations to be financially viable. As a result, there are reports of workers being laid off, and within the sector there are grave concerns that some of the centres will not be around come fall. That would be disastrous for an already fragile sector and the working parents who rely on its services.