Redundancies loom for UK Employees

As the second wave of COVID cases looms for the country, new research warns that a third of UK employers are planning to make their staff redundant. This news comes as the furlough financial lifeline comes closer to the end.

The scheduled end date of the government package is on the 31st of October. YouGov polled more than 2,000 managers from different-sized firms. Of these respondents, 37% believe that they will most likely issue redundancies by the end of the year.

Larger companies have already made job cut announcements. Oil company Royal Dutch Shell and TSB bank announced on the first day of the month their company's resizing with over 10,000 job losses between them.

They join the roster of some of UK's best-known companies who have already made job cuts. Early into the pandemic, airlines such as British Airways and EasyJet were one of the first who announced their business move. Retailers Mark & Spencer, John Lewis, major manufacturers Airbus and Rolls Royce have also already made restructures to their organization.

Another report reveals that at the start of September, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme furloughed about 2.8 million workers. These were employees of small and medium-sized firms.

Under the current COVID restrictions, over 133,000 SMEs have stopped operations or are open at a reduced capacity. Heavily affected are the hospitality and events sectors. The same report shows that SMEs are suffering a sharp decline in their incomes. Over 300,000 firms are making less than half of what they did in the previous year of the same period.

The Labour Party and the TUC criticised the government saying that the government needs to do more to protect all workers' jobs. The replacement job support scheme has also been met with criticism and growing concern.

This new scheme will put more financial burden on to the employers and away from the taxpayer. Many hope that companies implement reduced work hours instead of doing mass redundancies.

Today, October 1st is the deadline for employers to issue redundancy notices should they decide to release 20 to 99 workers.