the SGNews news blog

The SGNews Blog is a frequently-updated list of Canadian and international news links of interest to progressive readers.

Sep 282012
 

from the Edmonton Journal

Temporary Foreign Workers are especially at risk.

…Why are Alberta’s paid farm workers still excluded from the province’s labour code? Why are they denied the same rights and protections of occupational safety legislation that cover every other worker in the province?

They are excluded from laws that govern hours of work and overtime pay and vacation pay. If they’re injured on the job and their employer hasn’t voluntarily covered them under the Workers’ Compensation Board, their only recourse is to launch a lawsuit for compensation…

Full story

Sep 272012
 

Rona Ambrose voted for Motion 312 and against women’s rights – pro-choice advocates

from Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada

Canada’s national pro-choice group is demanding the resignation of Rona Ambrose, the Minister for Status of Women. [NDP critic Nicki Ashton has echoed the call.] The Minister voted in favour of anti-abortion Motion 312 on Wednesday, which sought to bestow legal personhood on fetuses in order to recriminalize abortion.

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Sep 252012
 

Medical errors kill enough people to fill four jumbo jets a week.

When there is a plane crash in the US, even a minor one, it makes headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely.

The world of American medicine is far deadlier: Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the dark about which hospitals have significantly better (or worse) safety records than their peers….

How to stop hospitals from killing us

Sep 202012
 
Romney_with_unpaid_coal_miners

From Daily KOS

 

Mitt Romney must have really liked his campaign event using coal miners as a backdrop after their employer, Murray Energy, made attendance mandatory and unpaid, though they lost paid work time to attend. Romney liked it so much, in fact, that his new ad attacking President Barack Obama for supposedly being anti-coal uses images of Romney standing in front of those miners as they lose pay to be forced to listen to him.

 

Full story…