Roofing company says CERB behind lack of employees

Justin Fall says the company he co-owns, Advanced Roofing in Moose Jaw, is struggling to find workers and believes the Canada Emergency Response Benefit is the reason for it.

“We’ve reached out to past employees to see if they were interested in coming to work and they’ve flat out told us that they’re going to just ride the CERB payments out and may be interested after that’s done,” said Fall. “A lot of these guys wouldn’t make much more than that working full-time 40 hours a week so if it’s between that and sitting at home and they’re getting the same money, I think they’re happier to stay at home.”

Recent job numbers came out and Saskatchewan’s unemployment rate dropped by 2.8 per cent to 8.8 per cent as the economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

Despite that, Fall said the company’s efforts to find employees have not been rewarded. During a normal year, he said they would normally have about 20 employees working for them and would have up to 50 during busy years. This year, he has just six employees.

“We cannot find people anywhere. We run ads on social media, we run ads on the job works website. We have an ad that’s been on there for a week now and we’ve had two applicants and neither of them were qualified,” Fall said. “We would have 25 applicants if we had an ad up for a week last year.”

Fall said business is down about 30 to 40 per cent so far this year. He said the one thing that has been down has been new builds, but he doesn’t know if the COVID-19 pandemic is to blame for that.

“I’m not sure if that’s just the economy or if it has anything to do with COVID because things seem to be normal to us. People that need to get their roofs done seem to be getting their roofs done,” Fall said. “That could just be a reflection of the economy as a whole because it has been going down the last couple years. Nothing alarming at all. It’s kind of the way the trend has been going the past few years.”

But despite the drop in business, Fall said they still need to find the workforce to catch up with their current projects.

“We are way behind in our schedule because of the lack of employees. If I could have the amount of employees that we need for the amount of work we have, I’d have 20 employees,” Fall said. “It’s not an easy job and I get it. Sitting at home and making the same amount of money is a lot easier than being on the roof.”