Workers Across Industries Struggling To Survive During Coronavirus Shelter-In-Place
SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) -- Local governments are doing what they can to help people who are out of work during the Bay Area shelter-in-place. That relief can't come soon enough for thousands of workers, especially in the service industry.
Nicholas Javier of San Francisco was a full-time server at The Oak Room Restaurant inside the Westin Saint Francis in Union Square. He would normally take home up to $700 a week. But within the last two weeks, that was cut in half. With the restaurant closed, he's out of a job.
"Feels like the rug has been pulled out from under my feet and all the air has been sucked out of the room," said Javier on a Skype call with KPIX.
He says his is rent in San Francisco is $1,200 a month.
"My tips are the things that I live on and when people disappeared and dissipated, I lost all of that," he said. "So I was expecting to be able to cover my rent, it's usually enough to just squeeze by on the rent."
Now he doesn't know if he'll be able to pay for that, his bills, or health care. Javier is a member of UNITE HERE Local 2. He is one of 14,000 hotel, stadium, airport and food service workers in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
To help soften the impact, Mayor London Breed has announced a moratorium on residential and commercial evictions.
"Thanks to Governor Gavin Newsom, we have the ability and we have issued a directive on commercial evictions as well, and so we wanted to make sure that businesses as well as residents who will be impacted most likely sadly due to a loss of income that the last thing they need is an eviction," said Breed.
In the South Bay, Councilmember Lan Diep is proposing a number of measures to bring relief to small businesses in San Jose. They include a moratorium on commercial evictions and partnering with corporations like Google and Apple to create a relief fund.
"This coronavirus period will pass but beyond that will be a recovery and that recovery might be very difficult if during these few weeks we lose a lot of our small businesses," said Diep.
