This pandemic has shown that ECEs are essential for daycares to run, so parents can work, and for children to have quality care. I feel it is unfair for us ECEs, who are an important part of children’s development, to be left with debt and the fear of poverty.
Letter: “One would think that after 31 years of service working for the same employer, I would be retired or planning my retirement. Unfortunately this is not the case, as my employer cannot afford a pension plan for it’s staff. Who by the way deserve a great pension plan!!!! So I will have to keep working until I am 65 years old and maybe older in a job that is physically and mentally demanding.”
There is a substantial wage and benefits gap between Early Childhood Educators employed by child care centres and those who work at the provincial pre-primary program. At a press conference hosted by Nova Scotia NDP MLA Claudia Chender, early childhood educators explained why this is not only unfair, it’s also creating all kinds of problems for child care centres throughout the province.
Press release: Nova Scotia Federation of Labour President Danny Cavanagh is asking why the provincial government is not offering any help to families without childcare whose children are facing extra time off from school in January 2021.
After 50 years of promises there still is no universal child care program in Canada. Meanwhile, the Covid shutdown has brought women to the lowest level of participation in the paid labour force in three decades. Women’s unemployment surpassed men’s for the first time in 30 years. Is there an economic war on women? I ask you to judge for yourself, writes Judy Haiven.
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.
Letter: I realize that we must strive to get the economy back up and running, but at what expense? Do we risk the lives of the day care workers or others including parents and families for the sake of supposedly getting unemployed mothers /partners back to work.
Lack of masks, together with the use of substitute workers and the absence of paid sick leave were contributing factors in the many coronavirus-related deaths in long term care facilities across the country. Let’s not make the same mistake twice.
The coronavirus crisis is an absolute disaster for women in so many ways—work, income, personal safety, housing, family life. Judy Haiven takes a closer look.
We talk with an early childhood educator who is concerned about going back to work maybe as soon as early June. “Right now there’s a lot of talk going into the plan to reopen about PPEs, there’s a lot of talk about ratios. And those are good things that we need to talk about, but I don’t see enough talk about sick time, or wages. And those are two things that we know were part of the spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes,” she says.