Coronavirus: Family feels pain of joining the welfare queue for first time

Despite taking a 50pc salary cut, white-collar worker Dean Davis was still made redundant and is now on welfare.

Michelle Jacobs and Dean Davis with their 10-month-old son at home in Caulfield. Mr Davis has lost his job. Picture: David Geraghty

An unscheduled Zoom meeting was the only warning that something was amiss at the technology start-up where accountant Dean Davis had worked for the past 18 months.

Two hours later, the father of one was made redundant, making him one of potentially hundreds of thousands of
white-collar workers feeling the economic pain of the coronavirus pandemic.

“It was very sudden and it’s been challenging. The job market at the moment is rough,” said Mr Davis.

“I’m doing everything I can to find a job, but there’s not much happening so it’s stressful.”

Mr Davis and his wife, Michelle Jacobs, live in Caulfield, in the well-heeled Melbourne electorate of Goldstein where the average annual household income is $104,936.

Prior to his redundancy, Mr Davis, who is in his early 40s, accepted a 50 per cent salary reduction for the month of April as part of his company’s cost-cutting measures.

But late last month, he was given the tap on the shoulder. Within two weeks, he had lost his healthy six-figure salary.

Ms Jacobs has been on maternity leave since last year, and cares full-time for their 10-month-old son. She plans to return to work part-time as a teacher in the coming months.

“We’ve used up a lot of our savings because prior to having the baby both of us were working,” she said.

“Now that my husband has been made redundant, it’s been a big shock for us because that wasn’t how we budgeted for 2020.

“We were relying on an entire full-time salary and, once I returned from maternity leave, a little bit more money to boost our budget. Now that entire salary has been cut.”

The couple are also the primary carers of Ms Jacobs’s elderly grandmother. For Ms Jacobs, this means weighing up the health risks associated with her return to work.

“I’m scared about being potentially exposed because then the risk will be higher to me and I need to make sure I can look after my grandmother,” she said. “My fear is that the more I’m at the school, the more I’m exposed to the pandemic risk, the more I potentially pass it on to my grandmother. That’s an emotional stress because I don’t want to be responsible for getting her sick.”

The couple were successful in applying for a mortgage pause to ease the financial burden of the job loss. Mr Davis is also eligible for the federal government’s JobSeeker payment.

“I’ve never had to rely on assistance from the government so I didn’t know what the amounts were prior to this. But I’m very grateful for JobSeeker and the JobKeeper and what they’re doing to keep everyone afloat,” he said.