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In honesty, without knowing what you do, I don't see that as taking advantage, there's an element of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
We sent staff home a few weeks back but have some staff on various forms of state-assisted wage refund. One was on temporary redundancy (not sure how it works, but broadly what it sounds like and you MUST take them back) but now is on sick as she's tested positive, a bunch of others are on special parental leave as they have partners who work in healthcare or are also working from home and the rest are working from home as close to normally as possible. We make sure that they earn their full salary by topping up the statutory in the case of the temporary redundancy but we have to pay out the people on parental leave and then reclaim 80% from the government.
Given the lack of certainty about how the economy develops, we'd be silly to continue to pay people without getting the rebates on offer. In the long run, we may not have needed them but I reckon circa 20% of staff are not working for a variety of reasons so it provides a buffer against a certain amount of our business going away before we NEED to do something far more disruptive which we absolutely don't want to do.
Exactly what’s happened at my place, which is deemed an essential service. We made a killing in the weeks leading up to the shut down, now four of us have been stood down so the owner’s son is running the place for 4 hours a day, so they’ll save on our wages while running on the bumper crop we earned leading up to the shutdown.
I can see why they did it, but I do think it’s taking advantage of the system. Meanwhile I’m at home doing nothing, I’ll get paid 80% of my usual salary but I’m as bored as arseholes and frankly I’d rather be at work.