Germany extending furlough to 24 months!

[latticechaos]

Saw that Germany was planning to extend their furlough scheme to 24 months because they don't expect the crisis to ease any time soon and they want to help citizens.

Made me feel pretty really, UK is going to see a sackload of job losses over the next few months.

I always felt the French plan for part time furlough was better than our scheme. UK scheme was very generous short term but has a hard ending.

@Twirlytwoo

But I don't believe Germany have anywhere near as much debt as the U.K. do, so they can probably afford to pay out for furlough for 24 months.

Indeed that's true. Not to mention they have a very different economy based on manufacturing rather than our fickle "service" economy, so will have a stronger and quicker bounce back anyway.

I really believe the UK will really regret concentrating so much on our service economy to the detriment of manufacturing and technology.

One thing the government could do is to use this as a fresh chance to encourage specialist manufacturing and other ‘niche’ type industries like Germany has been encouraging for years - to give us a stronger long term economy not so reliant on buying cheap stuff from China for example or the service / finance sectors.

It could encourage this right now with the people who have become unemployed with grants.

@IceCreamSummer20

I wish they would!

I'm on Kurzarbeit in Germany and there's not a day goes by where I'm not thankful to be here weathering this terrible storm.

@Badbadbunny I agree. And with Brexit I think we are really going to struggle. Also the problem with manufacturing is no one wants to work in a factory, they would rather be in an office.