CANADIAN service workers are faring even worse during the pandemic than previously thought with hundreds of thousands of those who still have jobs not actually putting in any hours at all, and a grim holiday season could add to the pain.

Canada has so far clawed back nearly 80 percent of the jobs lost to the COVID-19 crisis, official data shows. But a deeper analysis reveals that the ranks of the under-employed — people who are working less than half their usual hours, or none at all — have swelled to well above February levels.

There are 391,300 Canadians employed but working zero hours because of the pandemic, data provided to the media shows, and another 42,100 working less than half their usual hours. The vast majority of these workers are in the hard-hit service sector.

“You take a look at a restaurant or a barber: They’re operating, but they’re nowhere near capacity,” said Royce Mendes, senior economist at CIBC Capital Markets. “So there is a significant amount of unused labor.”

Under-employment, like unemployment, spiked across Canada in the spring as businesses were shuttered to curb the spread of COVID-19. But while employment has improved, under-employment remains more than 50 percent above pre-pandemic levels, highlighting the unevenness of the recovery and laying bare an underlying weakness that will make recovering from the next slump harder.

“There’s a whole category of workers who don’t indicate they have actually been laid off, but they might not have a business that is open to show up at,” said Brendon Bernard, an economist with online job-search company Indeed Canada.

There are always some people in the labor force who are employed but have no hours, such as substitute teachers and casual workers, economists say.(SD-Agencies)