Canada

MAY 14, 2020

Physical distance makes campaigns difficult but not impossible, says union

Despite providing vital services and risking their well-being just by going to work, many previously “invisible” private-sector employees — like janitors, personal support workers and truckers — now deemed essential are still among the most overworked and underpaid.

In response, Services Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 2 has launched a national unionization drive for these essential workers.

May 15, 2020

Key facts:

May 10, 2020

Across Ontario, seven health-care workers have died from COVID-19 and more than 3,200 are sick.

Those sobering statistics has pushed the province’s largest union to lobby for one piece of equipment that may help those on the front lines.

“We’ve been calling on the government to use its emergency powers to order industry to produce the N95 mask and it was disappointing to learn General Motors in Oshawa will be making masks but not the N95 masks,” says Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions.

May 10, 2020

On Saturday, May 9, 2020 a large cavalcade wended its way through the city of Oshawa, past the major city hospital (Lakeridge Health) and Hillsdale Terraces, a long-term care home where Covid-19 has infected 42 residents (of whom 14 died), and 13 staff members. The cavalcade of 65+ vehicles ended up at the sprawling General Motors Assembly Complex, now mostly empty since GM abandoned vehicle production last December.

Support Health Care Workers – Manufacture More PPE

MAY 7, 2020

The shitweasels are multiplying.

The rush to reopen the economy highlights a divide between those motivated by public health and those who would sacrifice minimum wage workers to protect profits

Last week John Ivison wrote a lazy screed for the National Post arguing that the CERB was too generous and would prompt minimum-wage workers to stay home rather than return to work in the middle of a pandemic.

MAY 9, 2020

Pandemic brings systemic issues around remittances and migrant labour exploitation into sharper focus

Since mid-March, the enhanced community quarantine imposed on the Philippines’s largest island in response to COVID-19 has caused life to grind to a halt, closing down public transportation and most businesses and throwing people out of work.

The effects of this dire situation have reached Canada, as many overseas Filipino workers and families face the urgent need to send remittances home despite their own precarious situations.

5 May 2020

Amidst the pandemic, a flawed negotiation approach quietly aims at assimilation, not reconciliation.

When measures to combat COVID-19 went into full effect in Canada, it was on the heels of cross-country protests in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs blocking a gas pipeline.