Re: “Seasonal workers vulnerable with EI rules,” Letters, June 21.
A person close to me, “Daniel,” has been busting his hump while labouring very hard in B.C.’s forestry sector – every kind of work, except “killing the trees” – in order to stay off of the public dole.
Nonetheless, no matter how hard he – along with many others who feel that they were born to do forestry work – attempts to find paying work, there are always random occurring and varying week-numbered periods of EI-dependence for him.
However, our federal government has made it clear that it’s not going to accept as good enough Daniel’s unrelenting efforts at finding paid forestry work, regardless of the fact that B.C.’s Liberal government has broken provincial laws stating that it must adequately maintain a healthy forestry sector.
Sure, the government finds no problem when it comes to razing large swaths of trees for countless square kilometers, but everything else is gone, including what once was reliable forestry work.
Now Daniel is relying on a forestry profession that is at the very bottom of the list of back-breaking jobs that many people would be willing to perform – i.e. tree planting – and a gradually-graying Daniel is almost 50 years old.
Frank G. Sterle, Jr.