First of all, the government is saying that if you receive a supplemental unemployment benefit, then it's not eligible under CERB. For auto workers, for example, I have 50,000 members who have SUB top-ups in case of unemployment, including workers who work for the federal government.
Let me give you an example. Because of the pandemic, instead of our workers who are laid off going on employment insurance, they went on CERB. Right off the bat, they took a cut of $73 a week. We understand that with the pandemic, people were doing everything they could. But now that they're not eligible for SUB, a production worker, for example, who works for Chrysler in Brampton is out $370 a week over and above the $73. If you're a skilled trades worker, it's $520.
A lot of the employers in the beginning, because there was a lot of uncertainty, paid the SUB top-up. Then, all of a sudden, the government came out on May 8 and said, “Absolutely not. You can't pay SUB.” All of a sudden, you have tens of thousands of workers across the country who were receiving SUB, who are already struggling, and now at the end of the year there's going to be an overpayment created and they're going to have to pay back thousands of dollars. It just doesn't make a stitch of sense.
I can't get a logical argument. The argument is that we don't want employees to get the SUB payments if they're on CERB because that'll be an incentive for employers to lay off workers so that they can go on CERB and then employers will just pay the top-up. It's a crazy argument. It doesn't make any sense at all. At the end of the day, the only people who get screwed here are workers. I have tens of thousands of workers. I have workers who have just gone back to work in the auto industry who are scratching their heads. Their employers are saying to them, “We want to pay.” Employers called me. They've sent letters to the government to say, “We want to pay. What the hell is wrong with you?” The government is saying, “You can't.”
I've never seen a situation in which we're dealing with a pandemic. We have negotiated collective agreements that say employers have to pay the top-up, and the government is saying to the employers, “Don't worry about it. You get a free ride.”
We represent the workers at Marine Atlantic. It's a Crown corporation. In the collective agreement I signed with the federal government, there's an SUB. Hundreds of my members who provide the ferry service from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Newfoundland are on layoff and they're not receiving the SUB payment that we negotiated with the federal government.
If anybody can make a stitch of sense of this, please tell me, because I can't figure this one out.