General > General Technical Chat
Working From Home - Impacts of Coronavirus
jeffheath:
In the US at least, it doesn't seem like the government actually did anything to force businesses to lay off workers- people stopping buying their products due to fears of the virus, so when they laid off workers due to lost money, they said it was to "protect our workers from the virus." It seems like all the government did was incite more panic than anything.
james_s:
They forced businesses to close, that stops the income and forces them to lay people off. It's hugely expensive to keep idled employees around, you've still got to pay their health insurance and other benefits.
paulca:
Where as in the UK they have tried at least to pay 80% of the salaries of workers who can't work and their company want's to "furlough" them. As an aside I wonder if "furloughing" comes from farming where you plough the crop back into the field.
The theory is, it tries to put the economy on "Pause", rather than shut it down. At great cost they are effectively saying "Sleep" or "Suspend" in Windows, rather than shutting it down. They hope they can just poke it and it will fire back up.
I pay health insurance in the UK. My work provides a group policy with Bupa. It's about £120 a month and is taxable. Basically I visit my normal NHS GP and if a condition is identified I can ask for a "referral" which allows me to transfer to private care.
Sometimes the private care is in the same hospitals and only the food is different, but it gets your much faster access to specialist consultants.
cdev:
A huge downsizing and then outsourcing/offshoring of jobs now has been planned for a very long time to occur now. It has nothing to do with coronavirus.
Way back in 1986 (September 15-20, 1986) in Punta Del Este, Uruguay, what was then the GATT met and among the things they agreed upon was that they decided to outsource lots of jobs -they started the process to make services "tradable" which became the Uruguay Round and led to the creation of the WTO.
The service jobs which are framed as a "balancing factor" which means they give the countries leverage over one another they would not otherwise have. Oftentimes the leverage involves things that never see the light of day, like drug pricing or similar things not in the public interest.
This is why everything is being gradually privatized and globalized. To put those services into play. (Its refered to as a big game, with reports describing the state of play, etc.)
A vast deal between North and South that both props up the lower wage countries and helps the Northern countries be more profitable by allowing them to reduce wages, and shed jobs, which they frame as "efficiency gains". This is basically the economics of all trade in services deals and its promoted as if its carved in stone and the result of a democratic process, although its not as shown by the fact that actual people dont even know about it. We operate on assumptions of our leaderships having abilities to fix things which have not been true since the late 80s or early 90s. They deliberately put large swatches of policy space out of their own reach, putting them in the hands of the WTO and other global governance organizations. (which they control, however, in certain areas what they clearly want is an agenda thats very bad for most people, but great for the biggest corporations.)
jeffheath:
--- Quote from: james_s on May 11, 2020, 05:24:05 pm ---They forced businesses to close, that stops the income and forces them to lay people off. It's hugely expensive to keep idled employees around, you've still got to pay their health insurance and other benefits.
--- End quote ---
These businesses (the big ones, anyway) don't seem to make it clear whether or not they are furloughing for monetary or government restriction reasons, but at this point it's a chicken or the egg problem anyway, as the economy is actually crap now. However, I did find that several governors are ordering small businesses to close, which seems odd to me as they just kissed their re-election goodbye.
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