Contagion 2020

[Cheeky Gnando’s]

I hope he learns from all this.

^^^ Delirious with fever ^^^

Personally I hope he dies from it #bekind

[Shuto Makino]

A sign of a very strong and healthy economic system when, rather than accepting that productivity will take a hit during a pandemic and ill people need time to recover, the response of employers is to scramble to find ways to ensure business continues as usual while everyone is in quarantine or face economic doomsday.

^ not editing that word salad sorry lads

[Pete Seeger]

To be fair, if the country stops small business will be hammered. I really don't fancy paying 7 wages with no return for any length of time. Christmas is bad enough but at least you know it's coming

[Big Physical Acey]

To be fair, if the country stops small business will be hammered. I really don't fancy paying 7 wages with no return for any length of time. Christmas is bad enough but at least you know it's coming

Share the wealth m80

[Pete Seeger]

What wealth?

[Sarkozabal]

Got to be a good chance today's COBRA meeting results in a fortnight working from home for all of us

[Currahee!]

Got to be a good chance today's COBRA meeting results in a fortnight working from home for all of us

Some of us can't work from home though.

[Picards Forehead]

https://twitter.com/thetimesscot/status/...4556008449

The fam are way ahead of this news, been social distancing for years

[Charlie Kelly]

I've thought all of this is majorly OTT and still do to an extent but think it's incredible that the UK's medical advice is so out of step with the rest of the world :

Not against a week or so working from home, although if this affects my weekend trip to Islay in a fortnight I will be very unimpressed :

[Del-icious]

We're going on sat to the shops so we have about 2 weeks of stuff set aside. Not going full on 'prepper' but think it's worth having some stuff there for when the inevitable happens.

400 toilet rolls incoming

[PHOODLE-OUt]

Takeaways for two weeks

[Hammy]

Working from home until April 6th 

[Shuto Makino]

To be fair, if the country stops small business will be hammered. I really don't fancy paying 7 wages with no return for any length of time. Christmas is bad enough but at least you know it's coming

Surely a business like yours will be hammered anyway? Not like there's any way for people to work from home.

I really meant things like offices etc trying to come up with elaborate 'work from home' systems rather than just accepting that the nature of a pandemic means productivity will take a hit (and that a pandemic doesn't somehow obliterate the legal requirement to give sick leave). In some sense they're acting rationally within the current economic system, but that in itself is part of the problem.

[Pete Seeger]

If they shut everything down I'll still be asking the boys to work. No alternative sadly

[Shuto Makino]

Like I said, that's part of the problem. What you're doing makes sense in the current system because there's no provision for events like this. It's not a criticism of individuals.

I guess I don't really know how I'd change it, but a system in which everyone has to keep working through a global pandemic because we all go bankrupt otherwise clearly isn't working

[Roger H. Sterling]

Like I said, that's part of the problem. What you're doing makes sense in the current system because there's no provision for events like this. It's not a criticism of individuals.

I guess I don't really know how I'd change it, but a system in which everyone has to keep working through a global pandemic because we all go bankrupt otherwise clearly isn't working

I get what you're saying, and I know you've said you don't know how you'd change it, but unless we replace the plumbers and sparkies with robots, there's always going to be a section of society that would need to keep working.

[Felix]

Pretty much all the zero-hour contract workers I'd imagine.

[Felix]

Ireland shutting all school and colleges.

[PHOODLE-OUt]

CL and Europa League suspended

[Shuto Makino]

I get what you're saying, and I know you've said you don't know how you'd change it, but unless we replace the plumbers and sparkies with robots, there's always going to be a section of society that would need to keep working.

Pretty much all the zero-hour contract workers I'd imagine.

These are both true, but slightly different points to the one I'm making. Certain essential services will always be needed (emergency services stand out, but clearly aren't the only ones), but they're not the ones I'm talking about - I'm not saying civilisation should grind to a halt during pandemic events, but equally it's insane that employers are racking their brains to find a way to continue with business as usual. To take the example of university teaching (just because it's the one I'm most familiar with), unis are talking about moving to working entirely online - i.e. all in-person contact is moved, in a matter of weeks/months, to online modules so that the fact that many of the tutors are ill and many of the students are ill doesn't have to stop examinations from going ahead as normal. It's an obviously crazy idea that will never work, but unis are backed into a corner where they're terrified of having to refund tuition fees, and students in mountains of debt don't have the luxury of just being able to wait a year and resit everything, so everyone is scrambling to find ways to go on as normal. In the same way, businesses want to move everyone to working at home because a few weeks of reduced productivity will have a disastrous impact. Although some services are always going to be required to keep society running, I doubt many of the office workers being encouraged to work from home fit that bracket.

What it all does is turn the whole issue into an economic issue rather than one of protecting human life (bearing in mind that, in principle, the whole reason why we're given sick leave by employers in the first place is because it's recognised that recovery from illness requires rest - and 'rest' doesn't mean 'still working but doing it in your front room'). The point isn't so much that businesses are acting badly, or that individual employers are treating employees badly, as that a system in which this is the only rational way to act clearly places too much value on the market and not enough value on human beings. Like I said, though, I have no idea how I'd change it in practice - it'd take massive structural change on a global scale, of a kind that might not even be possible.

Zero hours contracts is a much easier point - this is just yet another example of why zero hour contracts are fucking terrible.