Women of the Pandemic by Lauren McKeon

Author:Lauren McKeon [McKeon, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

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A recession is, in its own way, a contagion. From closed shops and beleaguered companies, the disease spreads, triggering mass job loss, missed bills, evictions. The economic consequences of the COVID-19 lockdown cascaded through many industries that heavily employ women: hospitality, service, retail, recreation, arts and entertainment, but also, perhaps surprisingly, health care and social services—making it the first recession in Canadian history that is service-driven. All told, the pandemic plummeted women’s participation in the labour force to 55 per cent, its lowest point in three decades. In the first two months alone, 1.5 million women lost their jobs, sparking the term “she-cession.” Women in the core working ages, between twenty-five and fifty-four, lost more than twice the number of jobs lost by men in the same age range. But if women’s losses were unprecedented, so too was their ability to fix it. “On both sides—on both the carnage as well as the pick-up-the-pieces side—women are for the first time leading economic responses through public policies and through market actions,” Armine Yalnizyan, an economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, told CBC’s The Current in March. Meaning, women were driving the losses, but they were also, in many cases, driving the recovery.

Women could be forgiven, however, if it felt like they only saw evidence of the carnage. Before CERB was announced on March 25, and before the program began accepting applications on April 6, tens of thousands of Canadians who had already lost their jobs overloaded the country’s antiquated EI system. On one early Monday in March, people filed 71,000 claims, punching through the previous single-day record of 38,000 set during the 2008 recession. They broke the record again just a few days later, filing 87,000 claims. By the end of March, the government had 2.2 million EI claims on its virtual desk. People waited for hours and, more often, days to get through to Service Canada’s information line. One man reported making 1,700 phone calls before he got through, while others enlisted friends’ and partners’ phones to call from multiple numbers at once. To help with the overload, and in anticipation that CERB would trigger an avalanche on Employment and Social Development Canada, the government quickly recruited 1,500 volunteers from within to work the phone lines. In the end, about 7,000 people raised their hands to step outside their regular jobs and help answer calls. And still call times stretched like Guinness World taffy. Many people reported calling dozens of times before getting through, only to gratefully make it to the next step: listening to elevator music for, very possibly, their entire day. Or, as one woman put it in mid-April, “Finally got put on hold for three hours…made two loaves of banana bread and at 4:35 p.m. they answered. I swear I cried.”

By the end of September, at the program’s close, more than 8.8 million people had accessed CERB, totalling $80.62 billion in government relief. Many of them had stayed on CERB for months, holding tight to the lifeline.

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