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.

Social distancing, work from home, shelter in place—these are all strategies employed in response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Americans who have jobs allowing them to engage in social distancing are very dependent on their Internet connection. That dependence is only going to grow as time goes on. As...

March 23, 2020 TORONTO – Unifor calls on all retailers to match wage premiums and enhanced health and safety protocols in recognition of front-line service workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

March 24, 2020