When COVID-19 abates, there will be a great struggle over what policies and ideas take centre-stage. The public is certainly grateful to frontline workers right now – whether they are cleaners, couriers, medical dispatchers, postal workers, health care workers, or others on the frontlines. We must leverage this support to demand policies from governments that will actually help our society and working people.
We need to push for things like postal banking, an electric fleet at Canada Post, check-ins for seniors and living wages for all. There will be enormous pressure to return to the same dysfunctional policies as before to pay for the costs of COVID-19 and our country’s recovery: austerity, attacks on workers, the poor, and the earth, the push for smaller government, tax cuts for the rich, and dividing workers power by isolating us through working from home initiatives.
This is why, we are excited to announce that CUPW is a supporting partner in the launch of the Principles for a Just Recovery.
The principles are:
- Put people’s health and wellbeing first, no exceptions;
- Strengthen the social safety net and provide relief directly to people;
- Prioritize the needs of workers and communities;
- Build resilience to prevent future crises;
- Build solidarity and equity across communities, generations, and borders; and
- Uphold indigenous rights and work in partnership with indigenous peoples;
You can read more about each specific principle in detail by visiting: justrecoveryforall.ca
These principles are the kind of big-scale vision for what our post-COVID-19 society needs to become. They are not prescriptive, but visionary and offer progressive groups – environmental, indigenous, health, faith, anti-poverty, and others – a common platform to come together and articulate a vision for a better future.
CUPW’s Delivering Community Power already offers many concrete proposals that build off of these principles.
While COVID-19 has been a serious challenge and strain on our systems, it presents progressive forces a once-in-several-generations’ opportunity to fix many societal ills. It is also a pivotal moment to set ourselves up to avoid climate catastrophe, while creating a just transition for workers.
We must work hard to leverage the current public gratitude for frontline workers so that there is no going back, only going forwards.
In solidarity,