Thank you very much. That's a great question. I appreciate that.
I'm really grateful to be presenting with Armine, because I agree completely.
The first thing we have to focus on is health. If we're not healthy, and if we can't be healthy at work, we know that we spread this to others in our community. Our health is incredibly linked to each other. Income supports allow people to stay home when they're sick. That was why we introduced the CERB. It was to allow people to be able to afford to follow public health advice and stay home to limit the spread of the virus. That was largely quite successful. The second thing we need to do is to get the situation in long-term care homes under control and to improve the staffing ratios and protocols in place there.
In terms of profiteering, this is what I was talking about. Regular Canadians, the members that CUPE has, make less than $50,000 a year on average. You can talk to a construction worker or to a health care worker about what they see the government doing with all of these announcements around liquidity and supporting the banks, and they very clearly feel that they're being left behind. They're struggling to make ends meet. They're struggling to pay for their food and mortgage. They can't find child care. They see banks providing record profits. They see executives getting public bailouts at the same time that they're getting huge bonuses. That sense of unfairness really resonates with people.
In order for people to feel that they matter, we need to put them first. We need to actually make sure that we're helping people pay their mortgages instead of letting them go bankrupt and lose their houses. It's not good enough to get the money to the banks. We actually have to get the money into people's hands. The same is true for small businesses and for vulnerable communities. We don't want our favourite restaurants to close because they weren't able to pay their rent while they had to shut down to keep us safe.
I definitely think that the impact of the pandemic has not been equally shared. About 25% of people are office workers and can work from home, and they're saving money because they're not spending any money, whereas regular people are going back to low-wage jobs. They feel that while the banks are getting bailed out, they're getting sold out again, just like what happened in 2008.