Good luck with that.
Good afternoon, honourable Chair, members of the committee, and Dominic and Ken.
My name is Jerry Dias. I'm the national president of Unifor, Canada's largest trade union in the private sector. Unifor represents 315,000 members across the country who are working in nearly every industrial sector, including health and long-term care, retail, passenger transit, food processing, utilities, logistics and many others on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is a pleasure to be addressing all of you, despite having to do so remotely. I hope you have all been managing to stay safe and healthy during these difficult times. On behalf of Unifor, I sincerely appreciate the invitation to share our views on the federal government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I hope what I share here will go some way towards advancing this committee's work.
We are in the midst of an unprecedented public health and economic crisis that is being felt across the entire globe. There have been 5.8 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, with approximately 360,000 deaths, including nearly 7,000 here in Canada. With 7,000 Canadian lives lost and families in mourning, losses of this magnitude are simply beyond comprehension.
Unifor is proud to be a Canadian union. Every inch of our organization is dedicated to ensuring that the livelihoods, jobs and health of workers in Canada are protected. From our vantage point, the crisis has revealed many of the underlying flaws and weaknesses in our country's labour market institutions.
For example, early on in this crisis, it became blindingly clear that our unemployment insurance wasn't going to cut it. Decades of cutbacks and terrible rule changes all but guaranteed that this vital program wasn't equipped to deal with a sharp increase in unemployment.
For one, the system simply couldn't handle the flood of claims as workers were laid off in the millions, but more than that, many workers just simply didn't qualify. On a good day, less than half of unemployed Canadians actually qualify—42%, to be exact—for an insurance system they all pay into. If you can imagine it, those with low incomes, including the precariously employed, benefit less from the program than those who are financially well off.
EI has become a needlessly complicated program that punishes workers for being unemployed, denying them benefits, clawing back earnings and replacing only a small amount for them to live on. Then a crisis like this hits and the systems seizes. To their credit, the federal government quickly realized that they had to change tack. They created the Canada emergency response benefit program. The CERB is a simpler program to administer and provides income support to far more workers in need than EI would have. Still, the gaps remain.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to the House finance committee and shared my frustration that hundreds of thousands of workers are denied supplementary unemployment benefits under the CERB. This is money set aside by employers that would normally top up unemployment benefits, but which cannot be paid out under the current rules of the CERB program.
To call this restriction absurd would be an understatement. Unifor has launched a national campaign to fix it. I strongly encourage this committee to join us in calling on ministers Morneau and Qualtrough to address this loophole in the CERB program. This is the immediate challenge.
The bigger challenge is that of developing a more inclusive, equitable and responsive EI system once and for all, an EI system that is one part of a basic guaranteed floor of income support for those in need. Over the coming months, our EI system will once again be tested. Millions will see CERB claims expire and will look to re-enter the EI rolls. Many won't be eligible. We need to make immediate changes to the EI program to ensure CERB claimants aren't left to fend for themselves. If we don't do this, we risk a second wave of economic panic as people find it impossible to make ends meet and then default on their bills. This is not something the economy can handle at this time, especially as provinces continue to ramp up their reopening efforts.
The Canada emergency wage subsidy is another important tool to help bring workers back onto payrolls. However, recent reports indicate that only 10% of the $76 billion set aside for the program has been spent. Clearly, employers have been reluctant to apply for the program, which we also know anecdotally from the experiences of our own members. Some of the large employers we negotiate with have been dragging their feet on applying for the wage subsidy. In other cases, however, the program simply does not provide enough of an incentive for employers to apply.
By the time applications opened in late April, many employers had already laid off workers by the hundreds of thousands. It was simply too late. Now employers are looking at the cost of bringing workers back under the subsidy and wondering why they should pay health insurance premiums, pension contributions and payroll taxes out of pocket just to keep workers on paid leave.
There have also been problems with eligibility. Employers in the broader public sector, including our members in universities, colleges and municipal transit authorities, are not eligible even though they have expressed interest in the program. Finance Canada recently issued a call for feedback on the program, and Unifor has urged the government to revamp the program by expanding eligibility and covering workers' health insurance premiums and other non-taxable contributions.
All told, our income security policies in Canada need a major rethink. This obviously includes EI and the wage subsidy program, but our understanding of income insecurity has to extend well beyond that. This crisis has shone a spotlight on the low pay and increasingly precarious working conditions many workers have been forced to bear over the last few decades. It has also brought into clear view the gendered pay divisions of care and service work and how deeply undervalued this work is.
Unifor would like to see continued progress on implementing deep and lasting labour law standards reform, including a new federal minimum wage of at least $15 an hour and permanent paid sick days amongst other changes. The provinces must follow suit.
We recognize too that income security has as much to do with employment as it does with other affordability issues such as housing and rent, transit and mobility, drug coverage and child care. These matter as much to a seamless economic restart plan today as they do to a developing vision for a better, fairer Canada tomorrow. This is not a time for Canada to think small. This is a time to bring our best ideas to the table, ideas such as universal pharmacare, universal child care, a four-day work week, ideas like these that enable us to reverse course on rising job market precariousness. These are ideas that Unifor will be raising in more detail over the coming weeks as we unveil a comprehensive framework for Canada's economic recovery.
If anything, this pandemic has shown us that lack of government investments and dependency on global markets for essential goods and services can only backfire during a time of crisis. Whether it is for PPE, food or critical products like zero-emission vehicles, we need to rebuild our domestic supply chain strategically to strengthen the economy, protect the environment and stabilize jobs. This means a more active, dynamic and engaged government, a government working in the public interest, a government that is willing to be an active economic player, one that is ready to roll up its sleeves and chart a path to generate economic activity and good jobs, and not simply slash taxes, sign terrible trade deals and then hope that private industry comes to the pump.
Workers in Canada deserve better than that. Let's use this crisis as an opportunity to change how we approach industrial development, one that puts workers in Canada first. Unifor stands ready to help.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
