“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.
News release: 56 elected provincial and municipal representatives have issued a statement calling on the federal government to extend income supports to all migrant and undocumented workers. Claudia Chender (MLA Dartmouth South), Gary Burrill (MLA Halifax Chebucto) and Lisa Roberts (MLA Halifax Needham) are among the signatories to the letter which calls for “emergency income supports as well as all other social programs and rights ” for all essential workers regardless of immigration status.
“Events of the last few weeks have provided a disturbingly strong case that Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil’s well-worn, anti-union biases prevented him from making the right decisions on fighting the Coronavirus in Nova Scotia’s long-term care (LTC) facilities,” writes John McCracken.