Once again, government released a new requirement without properly consulting professionals that deal with this every day. This has resulted in confusing legislation that hurts small businesses even more than the initial requirement to eat five paid sick/illness days with less than two months’ notice.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not begrudge employee’s having the ability to stay home when they are unwell without the worry of losing pay. I’ve certainly dragged myself to work in rough circumstances because every dollar on my paycheque counts. Although, as a self-employed individual, I’m still out in the cold on this one.
However, small businesses are sucking wind. The pandemic has dragged and, while some businesses have been busier than they’ve ever been, many have taken on ever mounting debt and are struggling to find the employees they need to keep their businesses going. Inflation is hitting the roof, the housing market is nothing less than crazy and the ever changing rules, restrictions and required spending for covid measures has already hit businesses really, really hard.
The wage subsidies have been tricky, confusing and the rules were ever changing and evolving and on top of that, really shafted family owned businesses where family members were putting in long, long hours just trying to keep their doors open when no one else wanted to work. You know what would have made these programs really reach the people who needed it and have those people able to access them? If they had consulted with payroll professionals, accountants and bookkeepers to help devise a clean, simple and easy to understand application process. Many who needed these funds did not apply because it was too confusing and too time consuming to apply.
Then the BC government comes along to off-load five days of paid sick leave across the board onto the backs of employers. I’ve heard it from people over and over - well if you can’t afford the costs you shouldn’t be in business. It’s really hard to plan for the costs when they are constantly evolving and being downloaded when not expected.
All levels of government need to do better when implementing these programs and the first step is to actually involve the people who do this work on a day to day basis in devising these rules and systems so that they are easy to understand and implement.
As far as the changes to the five day paid illness leave? Keep in mind that this won’t be in effect until this legislation is passed and it sure would have saved me a lot of spreadsheet work if they’d just done this in the first place but I certainly welcome the changes. Link to the government press release below.