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APRIL 3 2020

The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next 

Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?

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:

[A link to the open letter is included near the bottom of the article. There is an option for individuals and organizations to sign on as endorsers.]

May 14th, 2020 

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 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.

May 2, 2020

I am getting sketched out. I am wearing a bandana on my face. I feel totally stupid that in frikken 2020, all I can find to protect my face is a piece of fabric. I am in the crowded elevator, breathing everyone else’s air. Mostly, people are making fun of me, or acting like I’m a paranoid weirdo. But one worker I don’t know well, a foreman from another trade, he looks at me with compassion in his eyes. I can see that he takes it seriously, as well.

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.