We can’t ask people to separate their fears about the climate crisis from the other economic pressures and systemic crises they face.
There is a common argument made against linking the need for climate action with inequality and social justice issues, which goes: “Getting society off fossil fuels is challenging enough. So why make the task even more difficult by requiring our transition plans to rectify the other injustices of the world?”
This summer, as controversial new procedures at the U.S. Postal Service snarled the nation’s mail delivery and stirred fears of how the agency would handle the election, rank-and-file workers quietly began to resist.
How are French workers responding to the multiple challenges posed by a resurgent COVID-19, a neoliberal government incapable of getting to grips with the crisis, and the limitations imposed by the public health emergency on traditional forms of mass protest?
Trade unions are on the defensive all over the world, under immense pressure from strong economic and political forces. We are facing a multiplicity of crises. Employers are attacking on all fronts, and the pandemic is being used as an excuse further to undermine unions, wages and working conditions.
The idea of a universal basic income, a system through which everyone is guaranteed to receive a base level of money periodically, is quickly gaining traction in Canada as the federal government looks for ways to tackle the economic downturn left in the wake of mandatory pandemic shut-downs
Of the many crises provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic across Canada, the dire situation in long-term care facilities and retirement housing may be the most widely and urgently recognized. Even Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose own party engineered the significant shift to more privatized and ‘marketized’ long-term care (LTC) provision in the 1990s, recently declared the system to be “absolutely broken.”
