Government Actions Must Focus on Workers!

With over two million jobs lost to the pandemic, the IAMAW calls for a government strategy that will replace those jobs with better ones.

The IAMAW calls on government actions to help workers in all sectors recover from the economic lockdown, particularly workers in the airline, and aerospace industries. Many sectors across Canada face the prospect of a long recovery.

Government actions to support these industries must focus first and foremost on workers. It must protect jobs and return laid-off workers to their jobs, protect collective bargaining rights, and come with legal guarantees that any financial support from the government will go first to support workers’ wages, salaries, and benefits.

Canada’s economic shutdown hit low-wage workers the hardest – especially women, youth, people of colour, and vulnerable workers in precarious forms of employment, government must encourage job creation and ensure essential service workers receive permanently higher wages.

We need to invest in and expand quality public services including long-term care, home care, child-care, skills training, post-secondary education, these investments will reduce inequality and ensure a broad-based, inclusive economic recovery.

We must reject the cuts to public services called for by the right-wing conservative’s austerity and privatization agenda. We need new, bold investments in the economy. That is how we will move forward together and build a stronger, more inclusive Canada for our families and the next generation.

Source: Canadian Labour Congress (CLC)