Should I volunteer for furlough to help my company and the economy?

JudyBlueFish

So I read all about furlough and listened to Martin's blog and wondered this. As a single mum, home schooling, working from home and studying part time also, should I present a case to my bosses that I am not able to work at a satisfactory capacity from home and volunteer for furlough? Is this the right thing to do to keep the economy afloat? 

sharpe106

 The government would be paying you to stay at home, how would that keep the economy afloat? The idea behind the furlough is to pay workers who would have been layed of during the crisis because the employers could no longer afford to pay them or they have no work for them to do.

Jeremy535897

The coronavirus job retention scheme is to help employers keep jobs rather than lay people off. If your job falls into this category, the scheme may be appropriate.

There will be cases where ten people did the same sort of job and the employer now only needs five. In these circumstances, if the employer asks for five "volunteers" to go on furlough, you could volunteer.

Deb813

I’m sure most of us would stay at home and do no work for 80% salary!  However how is this fair to colleagues who work full time for 20% more?  

Also a mum struggling to homeschool and work from home- join the club!

calcotti

Deb813 said:

I’m sure most of us would stay at home and do no work for 80% salary!  However how is this fair to colleagues who work full time for 20% more?  

Also a mum struggling to homeschool and work from home- join the club!

This crisis is going to throw up a lot of 'unfairness'. It's inevitable.

HornetSaver

calcotti said:

Deb813 said:

I’m sure most of us would stay at home and do no work for 80% salary!  However how is this fair to colleagues who work full time for 20% more?  

Also a mum struggling to homeschool and work from home- join the club!

This crisis is going to throw up a lot of 'unfairness'. It's inevitable.

I agree. I'm fortunate enough to currently work from home in a role that Covid-19 does not lessen the need for. On the one hand I'm very lucky, on the other hand my current earnings over those in different fields of comparable difficulty and previous earnings who are furloughed are very marginal after you factor in tax and NI. On balance, I'm not bitter - you cannot put a price on job security and in the current lockdown my work gives me a sense of purpose, of structure, of normality.

I happen to think the Government could have implemented - and could yet implement - a different solution to those it has put forward so far. Universal Basic Income, achieved through a reversal of the flow of council tax payments, using council tax records to identify how many individuals in the household should receive the payment. It should be offset by a temporary scrapping of the personal allowance and a temporary several percentage increase in all bands of income tax so that those receiving UBI and also working as usual (or on furlough, which I would argue should be lower than 80% rate because UBI would take such people far in excess of 100% of pre-Covid earnings), would get some bonus for working while others can't, though nowhere near the full value of UBI. Nonetheless, enough for cash in their pockets that they were desperate to spend when this crisis is over. Spending that would DIRECTLY kick-start the economy and protect the sorts of jobs we are talking about. There might also need to be an additional tax on the state pension temporarily, to take into account that UBI should be partially to their benefit to offset the particular challenges the present situation imposes on them, but that the full amount of UBI over and above the state pension would be overkill. Comparable tax adjustments for the self employed, albeit lower than for the previously mentioned groups because the necessary costs they have to pay even when the business isn't trading can't be wished away, might also be appropriate.

The ONLY losers in such a scenario would be those who are not up to date on council tax registration - some of whom will have done so as an omission, others of whom for personal gain at the taxpayers' expense - in both cases there's an element of personal responsibility there which they would need to promptly address. And finally the homeless, for whom I think there is recognition that supporting them into the system to a far greater extent than we ever have before is of national strategic importance and therefore I think it would be appropriate to treat as a bespoke group.