Governance & Institutions COVID-19 Response in Employment (Essay Sample)

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a negative impact on the economy across the globe. The major approach by different governments in different countries to curb the spread of Coronavirus was through the imposition of lockdowns and the establishment of policies meant to minimize interactions. The imposition of these policies made people remain unproductive and led to the closure of firms and consequently affected the economy. While the degree or the intensity of the negative effects was different across the globe, different nations almost took similar measures to attempt to restore the economy to the way it was before the pandemic. However, despite the measures that different nations have put in place, there is still a lot to be done to restore each country to its state before the pandemic. Moreover, there are uncertainties concerning the stability of the economy in different nations, mainly due to the likelihood of successive waves of COVID-19. The working from the home strategy was an approach that was put in place by different organizations to maintain productivity in the midst of the pandemic. However, the approach proved ineffective in different organizations due to incompatibility and slow transition. O.E.C.D. Countries, as well as other nations, have resulted in implementing job retention schemes as the major policy tools to improve the employment rate and prevent social fallout due to the crisis brought by the pandemic.
After COVID-19 was declared a major issue across the globe, the major concern by different governments was to assist workers and firms focus on dealing with the unexpected and sudden decrease, if not full stoppage of business actions mainly due to the government-imposed restrictions to curb the spread of the virus. In order to guarantee at least some progress in the economy amid COVID-19, different governments across the globe modified the existing job retention schemes and introduced new ones too. The job retention schemes were meant to provide the required liquidity to companies to keep their employees instead of letting them go or letting some go. This measure by different governments across the globe was meant to make firms retain talented and experienced workers and help firms ramp up operations conveniently as the economy recovered.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, governments across the globe viewed job retention schemes as the only way to prevent the economy from nose-diving. As of May 2020, about 50 million jobs across the globe were supported by job retention schemes. The job retention schemes sought to maintain jobs at organizations experiencing a temporary decline in incomes of employees whose hours were minimized. The job retention techniques took the form of short-time work (S.T.W.) schemes that focused on subsidizing employees for hours not worked, for instance, the French Activité partielle and the German Kurzarbeit. The wage subsidy schemes could also be employed to subsidize the hours worked and top up employees' income on reduced hours, such as the JobKeeper Payment in Australia and the Dutch Emergency Bridging Measure (Noodmatregel Overbrugging Werkgelegenheid, NOW). The major aim of the governments in the O.E.C.D. In implementing job retention schemes in their respective nations, the union was to make employees retain their contracts even when suspended (. Siddiqui, 2020, p. 5). With the uncertainties of COVID-19 in the wake of the year 2020, different governments only focused on maintaining the economy in the best way they can to ensure that restoring it to normal after the pandemic would be easy.
Different job retention schemes and strategies were employed by different nations in the wake of COVID-19. The COVID-19 crisis prompted different responses by the government and industrial relations stakeholders to protect the well-being and the livelihoods of employees. The Morrison Coalition Government's Jobkeeper scheme was put in place by the Australian government. The scheme was meant to inject massive public funds into the economy to protect jobs. In New Zealand, the government took a similar approach to job retention as the Arden Labor Government focused on providing loan schemes and wage subsidies to businesses alongside additional income support (Gravin et al., 2022, p. 1). Even beyond the pandemic, significant change in employment relations are still being witnessed as it remains unpredictable about how the post-COVID world of employment will unfold.