I'm Elizabeth Hotson and in today's Business Daily, with many government job retention schemes winding down,

I'll be asking whether they've got people out the habit of working.

Some people have gotten so used to that extra $600 a week payment that some of them are not so inclined to want to come back to work.

Did the enforced time off create some unexpected opportunities?

What I found was that people who had higher levels of education, people who had lots of savings,

were able to kind of take some time and pivot.

This is Business Daily from the BBC.

It's August and the streets around new broadcasting house here in London are pretty quiet,

but they're slowly coming back to life.

Part of the reason for the tentative uptick in activity

is that furlough is slowly being wound down

and some workers are trickling back into the office after a government subsidised break from work.

As a response to the coronavirus crisis, furlough in the UK and similar job retention schemes around the globe, like the CARES Act in the US,

provided an emergency safety net for people whose jobs were put at risk

when economies around the world shut down virtually overnight.

People have an effect been paid not to work,

and although that seems like the ultimate win-win situation, it's not as simple as that.

Whilst for some it's meant a well-needed break and some extra time in the garden,

for others it was at least at first a panic-inducing leap into the unknown,

with the shadow of redundancy somewhere down the line.

And whether it's been a good or bad experience,

a lot of people have a tale to tell, including Naomi, Carol and Chinello.

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