Workers of the North Shore : unemployed without income

Jean-Christophe Beaulieu, special collaboration

Tuesday, 13 February 2018 17:41

UPDATE
Tuesday, 13 February 2018 17:58

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SEPT-ÎLES | workers of the North Shore will have to spend the next few weeks without income because they have the misfortune to live in a region where the economy is going well.

Hundreds of seasonal workers in the fisheries of the North Coast will have soon exhausted their weeks of unemployment benefits. They will have to fend for themselves, without income, until the start of the next fishing season in April.

However, the workers in the gaspé peninsula do not live in this black hole of the same way. They are entitled to more weeks of delivery because they live in a region where the unemployment rate is higher.

“This is stupid, this is an incorrect understanding of our economic reality to think that these new rules were not going to have any impact here. An important part of our economy depends on seasonal work, ” explains the mayor of Sept-Îles, Réjean Porlier.

Guillaume Tremblay, president of CSN’s North Coast, specifies that the method of calculation is flawed. “It is a breach of our territorial reality of the part of the government. The solution would be not to base the number of benefits on the unemployment rate. “

Inequalities

Lyne Sirois, coordinator of Action-Unemployment North Shore believes that the situation is unfair. “We have the same needs, but one is treated differently,” she says.

More and more requests for social assistance from elsewhere to people who do not manage to work enough to have enough benefits for the weeks during the off-season.

Mr. Porlier deplores the fact that the North Shore is compared with 17 other regions in the calculation, and that the conditions are very different.