Employment and labour

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Canada’s Employment Insurance (EI) program is failing to support low-wage and precariously-employed workers, who have considerably less access to benefits than workers with higher wages.  Among the study’s findings: While 42 per cent of all unemployed workers qualified for EI in 2017, just 28 per cent of workers earning $15 or less per hour were eligible for benefits;
TORONTO—Le programme de l’assurance-emploi (A-E) du Canada échoue à soutenir les travailleurs à faible revenu et occupant un emploi précaire; ceux-ci ont considérablement moins accès aux prestations que les travailleurs à plus haut revenu, selon un nouveau rapport du Centre canadien de politiques alternatives (CCPA). 
TORONTO—Canada’s Employment Insurance (EI) program is failing to support low-wage and precariously-employed workers, who have considerably less access to benefits than workers with higher wages, according to a new Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) report.
REUTERS/Nick Didlick For the last decade, oil and gas industry supporters in media, civil society and government have honed a populist narrative revolving around two core arguments: 1) Fossil fuel development is vital to the national economic interest.
Photo from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Illustration by Scott Shields
Canada is addicted to oil. Like all addictions, ours is debilitating. It has erased the line between state and private industry (thin as that line is in most countries), stifles our politics, and is holding back local, provincial and national preparations for a world without fossil fuels. Curing our addiction to oil and gas will take time and money, and historic levels of Indigenous–federal–provincial co-operation. But it absolutely has to happen—starting now.
This report, which is published with PowerShift e.V., examines the threat to precautionary environmental, consumer, public health and labour policy arising from regulatory co-operation and "good regulatory practices" (GRP) chapters within the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA or USMCA), and the rebooted U.S.-EU negotiations toward a transatlantic free trade deal.
This report provides an up-to-date calculation of a living wage for workers living in St. John's. The report finds that in order to earn a living wage, a person working a full time, full year job in St. John’s would need to be paid $18.85 an hour. Currently, almost 70,000 workers in Newfoundland and Labrador earn less than $15 dollars an hour, the majority of which are women. For a minimum wage worker to earn the equivalent of a living wage in St. John’s, that individual would have to work at least 58 hours a week.