Should we keep paying workers to stay at home?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Governments are spending billions paying wages to workers who are no longer able to work due to the coronavirus pandemic. How long can we keep this up? Are we storing up problems by offering this type of unprecedented state-sponsored handout long-term?
We hear from an employee in the tourism industry who has been furloughed, a hotel owner in the North of England who has had to furlough most of his staff, as well as Torsten Bell from the Resolution Foundation think tank who originally proposed the scheme in the UK before it was adopted, and Eamonn Butler from the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute who argues that the system is open to abuse.
(Image: stock photo of a woman reading in the park. Credit: Getty Images.).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.1 | Today we're talking furlough, a stay-at-work scheme that many governments say is needed |
| 0:10.7 | to keep workers and the economy afloat. |
| 0:13.5 | You should be very careful not to make the rise in unemployment bigger than it needs to be. |
| 0:18.5 | And then for those people that do go through that change, |
| 0:21.1 | the state's job is to support it to happen as we move into the recovery. |
| 0:25.0 | It's costing governments billions. |
| 0:27.3 | And some are now asking, great for now, |
| 0:29.8 | but how do we get people off this state aid? |
| 0:32.7 | You can't sugarcoat this. |
| 0:34.3 | There needs to be some point that reality is going to hit home |
| 0:37.3 | and things aren't going to be some point that reality is going to hit home and things |
| 0:37.7 | aren't going to be what they were before. Home Trues, that's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:45.5 | At the end of March, we were obviously put on lockdown and then were advised, a percentage of us |
| 0:53.0 | at the office were advised that we were to be put on furlough, on the furlough scheme by the government. |
| 0:58.9 | Yeah, so it's been about seven weeks now. |
| 1:02.3 | This is Shola. |
| 1:04.0 | She's a senior marketing manager at a travel and tourism marketing firm in the UK. |
| 1:09.5 | And like some seven million other British workers at the moment, |
| 1:13.2 | she's found herself on the government's job retention or furlough scheme. That means because you live in |
| 1:19.6 | the UK, you're getting 80% of your income. Yeah, exactly. Is that okay? Yeah. I mean, as it stands, I'm not going out with friends. |
| 1:29.7 | I'm not going out spending as much as I would normally. |
... |
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