No to legislating against postal workers’ rights!

Workers’ concerns are everyone’s concerns

By Jeff Callaghan*

I think that the biggest issue for us as CUPW, when it comes to our employer, is making sure that the employer, and through extension the government, respects the work we do and does not just pay lip service to it. When we are in a pandemic they call us heroes, they call our work essential, and yet every time we go to exercise one of our fundamental rights in this country, that being the right to withhold our labour, the government steps in and has the employer’s back.

This Day. Postal workers launched a 42-day strike for paid maternity leave

A July 11, 1981 demonstration in Edmonton, Alberta | CUPW/AUPW.

1981 (30 June): Forty years ago, 23,000 postal workers in the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) launched a 42-day strike for paid maternity leave and other just demands. They had already held wildcat strikes in 1965 against sexual harassment and for better pay. In fact, the wildcats of ’65 were the main reason why the Canadian government institutionalized collective bargaining for public servants in 1967.

This Day. National Day of Mourning for workers killed, injured or made ill on the job

Monument in Edmonton, Alberta

Westray Miners Memorial, Nova Scotia

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

On the occasion of the National Day of Mourning, April 28, the Workers’ Centre of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) issued the statement, “The fight for lives is the fight for rights!”:

What Chinese doctors learned about the prevention and detection of COVID-19 from their experience in Wuhan

We are posting an interview with Wang Zhou, MD by Salon.com. Dr. Wang is one of the authors of the Handbook of Prevention and Control of COVID-19, published in China on their experience dealing with COVID-19. The introduction to the interview explains that frontline doctors in China assembled a comprehensive guide of what they observed about COVID-19 in Wuhan.

Hand-washing steps using the WHO technique

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=20&v=IisgnbMfKvI&feature=emb_logo

Everywhere we are being told to wash hands. But what does that mean?

Public testing for COVID-19 crippled by privatization: The case of Alberta

The refusal to stop paying the rich and increase investments in social programs has created the current situation where a health care system already over-capacity and where workers experience unsustainable workloads is now faced with the COVID-19 crisis. The  reversal of all privatization schemes is in order | PEGGY MORTON

Across Canada, labs with facilities to test for COVID-19 are overwhelmed. Both the speed of results and the scope of testing are far below what is needed, as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) and proven effective in countries like China, south Korea and Singapore. This is the case right across Canada and shows the need for significant expansion of public health laboratories.

All out to activate all working people to make sure the COVID 19 crisis Is resolved in their favour

Workers nationwide organize to uphold the rights of all | Workers’ Forum editorial, March 18, 2020

Workers’ Forum salutes all of Canada’s working people whose contribution makes life possible, especially under the conditions of all out mobilization to contain the coronavirus COVID-19. The immediate aim is to flatten the curve so that lives are saved and the health care system is not overwhelmed.

Postal workers on the front lines serving Canadians: Canada Post must ensure its workers are protected

Postal workers’ needs to perform their work in a safe manner have been systematically ignored. Postal workers’ concerns are not only for their own safety but for that of the public as well | LOUIS LANG

As the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak requires large portions of the population to self-quarantine, the service provided by postal workers is more important than ever to keep lines of communication open at a time on-line shopping becomes a main means households are using to provision themselves. Enabling postal workers to carry out their tasks means that workers in sortation plants, retail offices and letter carrier and rural and suburban mail carrier depots must be provided with equipment and working conditions they require to ensure their safety on a daily basis.

Emergency measures should be used to address crisis in seniors’ care in British Columbia

It is not acceptable at any time that the province simply hands over the funds and refuses to take any responsibility for what the operators do with it. The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on seniors makes this situation an emergency.

Meeting on the crisis in seniors’ care, Comox Valley, February 24, 2020.

By BARBARA BILEY

The neo-liberal anti-social measures that have been implemented by successive governments over the last several decades have resulted in a crisis in seniors’ care in many parts of the country. The proliferation of private seniors’ homes, many replacing what were public homes, has created a perfect storm, which has been activated in all its fury with the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Coronavirus and the sun: a lesson from the 1918 influenza pandemic

Fresh air, sunlight and improvised face masks seemed to work a century ago; and they might help us now.

Influenza patients getting sunlight at the Camp Brooks emergency open-air hospital in Boston. Medical staff were not supposed to remove their masks | National Archives

By Richard Hobday*

(March 10) – When new, virulent diseases emerge, such SARS and Covid-19, the race begins to find new vaccines and treatments for those affected. As the current crisis unfolds, governments are enforcing quarantine and isolation, and public gatherings are being discouraged. Health officials took the same approach 100 years ago, when influenza was spreading around the world. The results were mixed. But records from the 1918 pandemic suggest one technique for dealing with influenza — little-known today — was effective. Some hard-won experience from the greatest pandemic in recorded history could help us in the weeks and months ahead.

Oppose attempts to render the population passive in the face of pandemic

A lot of media coverage and official statements in the U.S., as well as from certain quarters in Canada, are focused on bad-mouthing China as a dictatorship which violates human rights. This is intended to divert from the fundamental point that China is defending every life – the most essential human right. The relentless campaign against China in relation to the outbreak of the virus goes so far as to say that 5G platforms and cell phone systems are used “to spy” on people.

World Health Organization advice to public for COVID-19 containment

The World Health Organization has issued the following advice to the general public on basic protective measures against the new Coronavirus COVID-19:

Strict comprehensive measures urgently recommended to contain the disease and protect the population

The World Health Organization (WHO) has advised strict comprehensive measures to contain the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) and to protect the population, including quarantine, testing, contact tracing, social distancing, and direct population/community mobilization. On February 20, the WHO published a report which noted:

Genocidal health conditions of Indigenous peoples

The CBC in August 2015 reported the results of a study from Statistics Canada showing risk of avoidable death for First Nations peoples twice that (in some cases five times that) of non-natives. On January 15th, 2016, it featured a plea by the Ontario First Nations Regional Chief, Isadore Day, that Canadians deal with the fact of inadequate health care for aboriginal peoples.

Nepean – Q & A from Electors: How will the MLPC support health care for Canadians?

Q: What does your party propose to support health care for Canadians?

A: Canadians’ right to publicly-funded, delivered and controlled health care must be enshrined in a new and modern Constitution given rise to by Canadians. Our Party stands for establishing a process so Canadians together can create a new and modern constitution which enshrines people’s rights, including the right to health care, education, child care, recreation and seniors’ care.

Time magazine’s 2014 Person of the Year: Ebola fighters

Time magazine has selected the Ebola fighters, who have fought to contain the Ebola outbreak, as its 2014 Person of the Year.  

Cuba, the first country to respond to the call for Ebola fighters now have over 400 health professional in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.