On the 4th day of the strike at the EDF PEI power plant in Pointe Jarry, small businesses are feeling the pinch and trying to stay the course. With power outages sometimes lasting 6 hours, the future of some is hanging by a thread and the repercussions are expected to be disastrous if the conflict continues.
As soon as the electricity comes back on, everything goes crazy for Serge, an IT technician. Power cuts are ruining his business.
Without electricity, we cannot carry out remote interventions for customers. There are individuals and professionals who call on us. For hardware diagnostics, we cannot do anything either.
Serge Naime, IT technician
Every day in this store, they also repair computers or game consoles. Wednesday’s outage dragged on, six hours without electricity and just as many delays on the order book.
Sylvia, the boss, is on edge.
With the small structure that I have, I cannot get a large generator to be able to operate my business. So no electricity, for me, is equal to technical unemployment. This means that I have to manage to be able to pay my employees who have not been able to work. So these funds, I am not a magician, I have to bring them in and there, I cannot.
Sylvia Coppee, computer repair business manager
Dyenaba is a pastry chef, but this early afternoon, the stoves will remain off
It’s quite annoying as I have orders in progress and I can’t fulfill them.
The young business leader was also on technical unemployment the day before, for several hours. She had to cancel an order.
Without electricity, no recipe and even worse for the pastry chef whose freezer broke down during a power outage.
I had losses, especially desserts, biscuit bases that had to be prepared. It’s huge. I’m a small business, I live off that. I don’t work on the side. It’s huge.
Dyenaba Virolan, pastry chef
But for her, it’s also a double punishment.”If there is no electricity, there is no water either because I have a cistern that is electrically connected.” she confides.
Eight years ago, the young woman invested her savings to open her business. Since then, she has been fighting to keep it alive.
We are being held hostage. We cannot carry out our activity while we pay the charges and electricity so as not to be penalized. And, on the other hand, it is taken away from us and we are prevented from working. It is our livelihood. If we do not work, we have no income.
Small businesses are also the most fragile. Without generators and solar energy, their clocks stop every time there is a power cut.
