This column from Unifor National President Jerry Dias and Daniel Bernhard, executive director of FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting, first appeared in the Toronto Star.
If Facebook’s latest plan to pay 14 Canadian media outlets for their content was a good-faith effort to support Canadian journalism, it would not have sworn participating outlets to secrecy, just to kick the tires on their offer.
Facebook is hiding these deals behind non-disclosure agreements because its real intention is not to pay for news, but to avoid paying for it.
This column originally appeared in the Toronto star.
There’s a reason why they’re called scabs.
“Just as a scab is a physical lesion, the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labour,” writes Stephanie Ann Smith in Household Words.
I could not have said it better myself. Scabs tear apart communities, pull down workers and prolong disputes – something, we at Unifor, know all too well.
It seems Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives just can’t pass up any opportunity to feed the party’s right-wing base and do some fundraising.
The Conservatives are standing in front of microphones and e-mailing supporters spinning a myth that the CRTC is going to police the YouTube and Facebook video uploads of everyday citizens.
If Bill C-10 – legislation updating the long-standing Canadian content obligations of commercial broadcasters for the modern era of Internet streaming - gets caught in this political crossfire, O’Toole doesn’t mind.
We have a national childcare plan at long last, and we cannot afford to lose it to political games in Ottawa.
It’s just too important.
It has been more than 16 years since the previous Liberal government tried to bring in a national childcare program, only to see Stephen Harper’s Conservatives kill it after Jack Layton helped them defeat the Paul Martin government
This column originally appeared in the Toronto star.
To hear executives at two of Canada’s largest retailers and a private long-term care home chain tell it, they did a pretty bang up job handling the pandemic – and promptly wrote themselves hefty bonus cheques to prove it.
We’re talking about millions in bonuses, on top of salaries that already put them in the top one per cent.
It’s been more than a year since the coronavirus pandemic took hold and air transportation was severely restricted.
Statistics Canada released the latest economic statistics on air travel this week. Unsurprisingly the numbers paint a troubling picture.
Large Canadian airlines carried less than 800,000 people in January. That’s nearly 90% less than the number of passengers the same airlines carried in January 2020.Operating revenues are down 85% compared to January 2020. GDP created by the industry fell even further, to just 11% of pre-COVID levels.
Last week’s budget made some important, headline-making investments, but when you consider the details, these broad announcements still do not cover the gaps that Nova Scotia’s workers need filled.
The budget announced that funding for continuing care, including long-term care and home care would increase by 13% over the 2020 budget plan, topping the $1 billion mark for the first time.
The refrain “if you’re sick, stay home” is not just smart workplace policy, it’s also smart public health policy.
Of course, COVID-19 has elevated the importance of this approach to new levels. Preventing the spread of COVID-19 in workplaces is a matter of life and death.
This month the premier acknowledged the link between provincial workplace policies and public health by legislating paid time off for workers to get the vaccine.
It’s time to take the next step and legislate employer-paid sick leave for all Saskatchewan’s workers.
The past year has laid bare the inequities in our society.
COVID-19 has shown that workers struggling to get by on minimum wage – from personal support workers, to grocery and warehouse workers – and those in the gig economy are not only essential, but put themselves at risk to keep our communities running during a pandemic.
Working families across our province have been forced to make impossible decisions between staying home when they are sick or going to work and risk spreading a deadly virus to their co-workers.
