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Most Canadians believe the pandemic’s impact is in the rear-view mirror. But it isn’t yet for a great many small businesses forced to shutter their premises due to “safety concerns,” even as their regular customers packed into COVID-spreading lines to enter big-box stores deemed “essential services.”
Behind those small businesses are people who have invested personal savings and long hours to achieve their dreams. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business reports that small-business insolvencies were up 34 per cent in the first quarter of this year, the biggest increase in more than 30 years. Many others are just barely hanging on.
CFIB president Dan Kelly fears the wave of defaults will rise as higher interest rates on debt taken on to survive the pandemic become “the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
Meanwhile, during COVID, public-sector workers kept their jobs, added two years’ credit to their gilded pension benefits and even, many of them, received wage increases.
Statistics Canada’s January 2022 Labour Force Survey found that all of the country’s 206,000 job losers were private-sector employees. Public-sector employment was 305,000 higher than at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
Not only did public-sector workers have job security during the pandemic, but they also enjoyed vastly better pension and other benefits.
A Fraser Institute report published at the beginning of the pandemic found that average federal, provincial and local government workers’ wages were more than nine per cent higher than those of their counterparts in the private sector.
Moreover, 88 per cent of government workers were covered by a pension plan, compared with fewer than 23 per cent of private-sector workers.
https://www.timescol...ion-gap-5836603
But now it seems the enormous compensation and job-security advantages enjoyed by public sector employees aren’t enough. The 120,000-member Public Service Alliance of Canada, largest of 17 federal unions, is talking strike, seeking a 13.5 per cent increase over three years.
PSAC president Chris Aylward says: “The government can’t expect workers who have been getting us through the pandemic to shoulder the costs of Canada’s recovery.”
Shoulder the costs of Canada’s recovery? How do you suppose that sounds to all those much lower-paid private-sector workers, many of whom either lost their jobs or were forced to work part-time?
The union members who’ve actually been “getting us through the pandemic” aren’t Aylward’s, but hospital, care-home and public-health workers, many of whom are represented by other unions. Their valiant efforts took both a physical and mental toll and they deserve both financial consideration and our gratitude.
Edited by Victoria Watcher, 18 September 2022 - 05:20 AM.
