Unemployment and coronavirus: How do European countries protect jobs?
Economists and experts weigh the difficult trade-off in fighting the coronavirus.
By their very nature, though, high-priced job-preservation efforts are most workable in the short term, perhaps over a period of several months. So a more drawn-out crisis, one with recurring large-scale outbreaks of COVID-19 and accompanying stay-at-home orders, might prove a severe test.
FRANCE: The government is in effect paying businesses to retain workers, spending some $50 billion to do so. For companies that are fighting to stay afloat, it is offering state-subsidized furloughs and loans while pushing back payment deadlines for taxes and loans. At the start of April, thousands of companies, including big employers such as the aviation giant Airbus, had sought government-backed furloughs for nearly 4 million workers.
BRITAIN: The government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson launched a program to pay up to 80% of private sector salaries until June, with a monthly cap of about $3,000, as long as workers are not laid off. But British officials have been struggling to get the program, which is known as the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme — in British English, “scheme” does not have the same nefarious overtones as in American English — up and running.
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