Hourly wage boost a blessing

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This article was published 30/11/2020 (1792 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Friday’s announcement of a $5 per hour wage top-up for front-line support workers couldn’t have come at a better time for Zahid Abbas, an asylum seeker working two part-time jobs to support himself, a daughter he’s raising alone in Winnipeg and his family back in Pakistan.

“This is awesome news,” he said Friday morning right after a shift at his Tim Hortons job was cut to three hours because business was slow.

“It’s a big help for us,” said Abbas, who earns $13.50 an hour at his second job as a support worker helping people with intellectual disabilities. When he started working for the non-profit organization Sept. 3, he was just grateful to be making more than the $11.90 per hour minimum wage.

The $35-million federal-provincial cost-shared Caregiver Wage Support Program gives an hourly $5 wage top-up to health-care aides, housekeeping staff, direct service workers and recreation workers making $25 an hour or less. Those who provide direct care to vulnerable Manitobans at personal care homes or in disability services, child welfare services, homeless and family violence prevention shelters, or long-term care facilities can get the top-up for shifts worked between Nov. 1 and Jan. 10.

Knowing that for a time he’ll be eligible for an extra $5 an hour as a support worker at group homes takes some of the financial pressure off the dad, who sends $400 a month to his wife and five-year-old daughter in Pakistan.

“In this hard time, it’s a wonderful government policy for lower-wage people,” said Abbas, who has been in Winnipeg since he arrived with daughter Kashaf in 2017. They’re waiting for the government to decide if they will be granted refugee protection. If they are, then her mom and little sister will be eligible to join them in Canada.

Kashaf and her dad travelled to the Shriners Hospital for Children in Tampa, Fla., where she was treated for webbed fingers on her right hand. She was born with Poland syndrome, which is characterized by an underdeveloped chest muscle and short webbed fingers on one side of the body. As a girl with disabilities, and her parents’ “mixed” Sunni-Shia marriage, she — and her mom who has been assaulted because of it — was a target for discrimination and persecution in Pakistan, Abbas said. He decided they should stay.

A Florida immigration lawyer told him that making an asylum claim in the U.S. was a costly and hopeless proposition for people from Pakistan. Abbas decided they’d seek asylum Canada. They headed north and walked over the border at Emerson three years ago.

Kashaf barely spoke a word when she and her dad found lodging in an inner-city rooming house before moving to an apartment in St. Vital, where Abbas found work and made friends — including a family next door that watches 10-year-old Kashaf after school and on weekends when her dad works.

Now in Grade 5, she’s shed her shyness, has friends and is thriving at school. She has only one complaint: “I miss my mom.”

Abbas said he’s hopeful they’ll be allowed to stay in Canada and his wife and younger child can join them. In the meantime, the second job that he had to take when his hours at Tim Hortons were cut because of the pandemic has turned out better than he expected.

In addition to the unexpected wage top-up, Abbas, who was a police officer in Pakistan, thinks he discovered his calling as a support worker.

“I would like to continue with this job,” he said. The training and the personal protective equipment he gets, along with the professionalism he’s seen, is impressive, said Abbas.

“I feel really proud and satisfaction when I am serving intellectually disabled persons,” said the man who learned a lot about the treatment of people with special needs from his daughter.

“I like to serve those who can’t help themselves.”

He shared a letter from his employer acknowledging his dedication to the job and the excellent care he’s providing.

“I am looking at a career for this.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca