Some of the people most removed from the economic pain of the pandemic-from a former Wells Fargo CEO to the President of the United States-have preached an urgency to restart the economy and get people back to work. “My worries on a daily basis, am I going to be able to actually pay my rent next month? How long is this pandemic going to go for? Am I going to have enough cash flow to keep going to the as things extend and move on for a longer period of time?”
He was there for the hotel’s last day open on March 22, when his coworkers almost started crying as they said their goodbyes, unsure when they would see each other again. “I don’t think anyone is financially prepared for this-the uncertainty of not knowing when this is going to end, or what’s going to happen,” says Clinton Castillo, who delivers room service at the Park Hyatt hotel near New York City’s Central Park. On top of their economic struggles, Jones and his sisters are the caretakers for his ailing parents. Meanwhile, Jones’s wife, a daycare teacher, has decided it is unsafe to continue going into work. By Friday he had already been taken down to zero hours, then informed he would have about two eight-hour shifts every other week. “Before you know it, we’re going to have nothing,” Jones told me on Tuesday. As business fell off over the first weeks of the pandemic, his hours were cut first to 36, then to 32, then to 28. Jones and his wife were already living paycheck to paycheck on his regularly scheduled 48 hours per week. “Everyone’s hours just got slashed to hardly anything,” says Arland Jones III, a roadside assistance technician in San Antonio, Tex. But since many more industries are affected, the figure is likely to skyrocket much higher. Pew forecasts that a 15% reduction from higher-risk industries like retail and food service would be enough on its own to immediately hike the U.S. workers who work in industries that are likely to feel an “immediate impact” from the coronavirus pandemic, the Pew Research Center projects.
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They are negotiating with their landlord on how to pay rent Jones’s boyfriend will do some roof work on their house to offset their payment.īeer and Jones are among the 38.1 million-or one-in-four-U.S. Her boyfriend, a roofer, has also seen a dramatic decline in demand as construction projects slow, she says. She has applied for unemployment benefits. “It’s impossible to pay bills on,” Beer says of their income.Ĭhelsey Jones, a manager at a coffeeshop in Hailey, Idaho, is currently without pay since the business closed as coronavirus spread through the small community. Beer says they will likely have to ask family members to help pay rent. She can’t turn to her roommate, a server who has no shifts at all, for help. Now she’s making $80 in wages a week filling carry-out orders, with no tips. She normally earns between $100 and $120 per workday in tips alone. Keep up to date on the growing threat to global health by signing up for our daily coronavirus newsletter.įor Cayli Beer, a 21-year-old restaurant server who lives with a roommate in a Kansas City suburb, the crisis has meant her shifts have been cut to one or two a week. The result will be economic dislocation for tens of millions of people. Businesses are closing their doors indefinitely, no one knows what’s next, and everyone’s just trying to keep the bills paid and their family fed and healthy as circumstances outside of their control shape the structure of their lives. Which is why this crisis has hit so many people so hard. The ability to prepare for an unplanned loss of income was out of the question. Even before the pandemic, a majority of Americans- 59%, according to a 2019 Charles Schwab survey-were living paycheck to paycheck, barely able to keep up. The coronavirus has collided with a troubling economic trend.