Workers who rely on hourly wages are seeing income loss due to COVID-19 changes and there isn’t any funding to help them out.
Bonnie Cox is a family support worker who has seen her hours go down drastically in order to follow physical distancing rules.
“We work typically in people’s homes with the vulnerable public so now we’re mandated only to do the legitimate urgent cases,” she said.
Cox said now she only goes into homes when there’s a major issue and there’s no other choice, which impacts her hours in a big way.
“I’m lucky my husband is still working. Myself, I’ve gone from approximately 44 to 50 hours per week. This particular week I was actually scheduled for one hour. Last week I worked six,” she said.
Cox said there isn’t anything that helps her with lowered income right now.
“If we are working and have any income coming in then it would not be something that we can apply for. I did look into the Red Cross funding and it specifically does ask if we have any type of income coming in and if we do choose yes, it tells us we’re not eligible.”
Cox said she reached out to John Williamson, Member of Parliament for New Brunswick Southwest and the answer she received back was that he would look into it.
Williamson did not respond to a request for comment, however he did bring up this hourly wage issue in the House of Commons as something to be rectified in the CERB on Sunday.
Wayne Long, Member of Parliament for Saint John-Rothesay said he gets a lot of calls in the office about how funding applies to different people.
“I think one thing a lot of people have to realize is a program of that magnitude is typically rolled out over a year and studied for at least six months, and we’re trying to deal with obviously extraordinary times and we’re rolling these programs out literally in days,” he said.
Long said because of these time constraints, there are people falling through the cracks and there are unintended consequences to the programs.
“We’re trying to be receptive, to have our finger in the pulse of who we’re missing, whether it’s hourly workers, whether it’s workers that can’t get a layoff whose hours have been reduced, whether it’s students, what have you,” he said.
Long said he passes on any concerns his constituents bring to him and he’s advocating for changes to help anyone missed.
“I would absolutely expect within the next literally day or two you’re going to see a lot of fixes to the program that are going to be a lot more receptive to the people we’ve missed,” he said.
Bonnie Cox said right now her choice is to ride it out and take the reduced hours and reduced pay.
Cox said she can also ask her manager for a layoff to be eligible for these funds, but because she works in a vulnerable sector, she isn’t prepared to do that.
