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The Government of Canada has expanded the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS). Simon Archer explains what CEWS is and how it works.
India Kerala coronavirus: How the Communist state flattened its covid-19 curve - The Washington Post
Sheeba T.M. was just one of more than 30,000 health workers in the Indian state of Kerala, part of the Communist state government’s robust response to the coronavirus pandemic. Other efforts include aggressive testing, intense contact tracing, instituting a longer quarantine, building thousands of shelters for migrant workers stranded by the sudden nationwide shutdown and distributing millions of cooked meals to those in need.
Throughout the US, bosses are putting workers’ lives in danger by forcing them to work in hazardous conditions during the coronavirus pandemic. Workers need to fight back to stop them — and they need unions’ support.
COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of our labor markets just as much as the fragility of our public health and welfare systems. As we take the economy out of its induced coma, we should ask what kinds of jobs we want and need.
This memo was sent to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office on Friday, April 3, 2020. It attempted to do three things in two pages: 1) encapsulate the problems that were emerging with the design of CERB, at the highest level – one of politics and trust; 2) clarify the technical problems with CERB as currently designed; 3) provide fixes for each of these problems. Its goal was to provide ways to expand coverage and protection to income supports available under CERB, which on that date provided $2,000 a month, for up to 4 months, in emergency income support to those who lose their jobs between March 15, 2020 and October 3, 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic means that many of us are staying at home and sitting down more than we usually do. It’s hard for a lot of us to do the sort of exercise we normally do. It’s even harder for people who don’t usually do a lot of physical exercise.
But at a time like this, it’s very important for people of all ages and abilities to be as active as possible. WHO’s Be Active campaign aims to help you do just that - and to have some fun at the same time.
COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in…
We believe that the outcome of this crisis will depend very much on the voices of citizens and organised civil society: whatever we stand up for now will shape tomorrow’s future. This is why we’re joining forces with allies to present our demands.
· We are demanding safeguards in all public funding going to Big Pharma, so that any vaccines and treatments against COVID-19 can be free of charge.
· We are denouncing how the authoritarian right is taking advantage of this crisis to stage a dangerous power grab, such as in Hungary, and demanding immediate action to protect our democracies.
· We are advocating a Just Recovery that puts people’s needs and rights first, to create a better future in the wake of this crisis.
The current crisis response is wrapped in a fog that conceals its true politics. The population is asked to believe that our politicians are not as partisan as they were just four weeks ago. We are to believe they have charted a new course bringing workers and business together. Look more closely and you will see they are barely wavering from the path they were on before they heard about the novel coronavirus.
As this pandemic is creating a lot of “firsts” for institutions and students’ unions, we believe it is important to share resources on how to deal with the situation at hand.
On March 18, the federal government announced measures aimed at stabilizing the economy during the COVID-19 epidemic. These measures include direct supports to Canadian workers and businesses. If you are a student about to finish the school year or about to graduate, here’s what you need to know.
Long-term residential care shares with other healthcare organizations the negative impacts of neoliberal policies, namely cutbacks in government funding and a failure to keep up with demand for public services, managerial practices that create part-time jobs, contract work that eliminates benefits and irregular hours of work, the downloading of labour to those with the fewest formal credentials, the reduction of staff to a minimum, tight control over workers, and the privatization of ownership as well as the contracting out of work in non-profit and municipal homes. All of these policies and practices have an impact on the conditions of work that are the conditions of care.
If all country pandemics were the same, then the figure below would be how this pandemic will come to an end. The start-to-peak ratio of Covid-19 infections for all countries would be 40-50 days. Many countries are not yet near the peak point and there is no guarantee that the peak will at the same time point, if mitigation and suppression methods (testing, self-isolation, quarantine and lockdowns) are not working similarly. But ultimately, there will be a peak everywhere and the pandemic will wane – if only to come back next year, maybe.
Services and products for people in need are going to be the problem in the coming weeks. Current supply chains are complex and some businesses …
Legislation brought in by the former B.C. Liberal government in 2002 allows long-term care homes to contract out such services.
The nurses who work at the Lynn Valley Care Centre are represented by the BC Nurses' Union, but the facility's other care aides — who previously fell under the Hospital Employees' Union — haven't been unionized since 2012. It also stopped representing the home's kitchen aides and dietary staff after those services were contracted out in 2017.
Care aides at the facility told the Globe and Mail recently that wages and benefits have since slipped dramatically.
Emergency measures have arrived and while these would always be necessary in this kind of crisis, but we are starting off at a very bad place of under-staffing and decades of policy that have limited the growth of hospital services.
It is a market model that caused this crisis where excess beds in a hospital is considered a bad thing; where minimum staffing is the goal.
The crisis is showing what levels of investment and workers would be necessary to absorb any crisis in society. We have been given advanced notice of the coming storm this time and we are still woefully unprepared. Next time, we may not be so lucky.
According to AFP estimates, some 1.7 billion people across the world are now living under some form of lockdown as a result of the coronavirus. That’s almost a quarter of the world population. The world economy has seen nothing like this.
Nearly all economic forecasts for global GDP in 2020 are for a contraction of 1-3%, as bad if not worse than in the Great Recession of 2008-9. And forecasts for the major economies for this quarter ending this week and the next quarter are coming in at an annualised drop of anything between 20-50%! The economic activity indicators (called PMIs), which are surveys of company views on what they are doing, are recording all-time lows of contraction for March.
As the U of A responds to the COVID-19 crisis, everyone working at the university has pulled together in amazing ways to keep things running. The university now needs to show its support for everyone working on campus: student workers, support staff, faculty and academic staff, academically employed graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. These groups are all vital in supporting the university’s mandate.
Cuba is sending its medics to Lombardy after nearly 800 Italians died from the virus on Saturday.