THE end of the UK’s furlough scheme will increase work inequality, with women and older people more at risk of losing their jobs, campaigners have warned.
The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme will be withdrawn at the end of this month, after a year and a half of supporting employees through the Covid crisis.
UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak has rejected calls to keep it open, despite concerns jobs are still at risk due to the impact of the pandemic.
Latest official statistics show that around 5% of men and the same percentage of women were being paid through the furlough scheme at the end of July.
But more than one-third of furloughed jobs in Scotland are in female-dominated retail and hospitality, according to charity Close The Gap, which works to address inequality in the workplace.
READ MORE: Explained: When is furlough ending and how could it affect my job?
Other sectors which have continuing high rates of furlough include travel agencies, which have 93% female staff, and arts and entertainment, which have 60% female staff.
Anna Ritchie Allan, executive director of Close The Gap, said the majority of those who had been furloughed were women – and they were likely to have been furloughed for longer.
“That is largely because of the sectors in which they are working, because women are concentrated in those low-paid service sectors that are increasingly precarious,” she said.
“What we have seen in the last set of figures is more female-dominated industries – accommodation and food services – returning, so that has slightly decreased the number of women that have been furloughed.
“But the fact remains the highest furlough rates are in hospitality and retail, which are those low-paid undervalued service sectors, often insecure work, and that is where a lot of women are concentrated.
“The end of the furlough scheme really does raise quite a lot of questions about what is going to happen to women working in those sectors and women’s labour-market equality more broadly.”
Ritchie Allan called for the UK Government to extend the furlough scheme and not stick to an “arbitrary” cut-off point, saying there was still uncertainty over the trajectory of Covid heading into the winter.
She said the idea that employees who lost their jobs would be able to fill in gaps in the labour market was overly optimistic.
“Once you scratch below the surface of that and look at exactly what kind of jobs are available, we see the increase in job vacancies is among low-paid work in those sectors that are notoriously insecure as well,” she said.
“So even if women are made redundant I think the argument that they will easily be able to find another job is somewhat flawed.”
The figures published earlier this month also show the over-65s had the highest take-up of furlough of all age groups at the end of July.
Age Scotland has raised concerns older workers will be among the hardest hit by the end of the furlough scheme.
Chief executive Brian Sloan (above) said: “Unfortunately, large-scale redundancies and a period of considerable insecurity could follow.
“With older workers most reliant on the scheme, its end will be a massive blow.”
The full scale of the impact of the end of furlough will not be visible in official statistics until December, due to a lag in labour-market data.
Stuart Mackinnon, deputy head of external affairs for the Federation of Small Businesses in Scotland, also raised concerns over the potential risk to jobs.
He said statistics showing there are fewer people on the scheme now than at the height of the crisis was a welcome sign of a more functioning economy.
But he added: “There is still a significant number of people in Scotland still on the scheme.
“When it finally winds down, a lot of businesses are going to have to make quite a lot of difficult decisions, especially if they are still not trading as they did before the crisis.
“There are the businesses whose market has been changed dramatically by the crisis – for example, events businesses who still aren’t able to trade as they once did for a variety of reasons. Similarly seasonal businesses where they may have missed the bulk of their opportunity to trade this year. Then there are businesses out there that are allied, for example, to international travel.”
He added: “So there is a question there about when the furlough scheme ends, whether they are going to return all of the roles they once had?”
Some countries are continuing their equivalent of the furlough scheme, with Germany and Ireland both extending support to the end of the year.
STUC general secretary Roz Foyer (above) said it was “incredibly irresponsible” to end the UK’s furlough scheme while many industries are still not yet operating at full capacity.
She said: “Job uncertainly is a major threat and we face the potential double whammy of rising unemployment but also labour shortages in some areas.
“This combined with the planned £20 cut to Universal Credit will create a storm for many workers facing a difficult winter.
“The best antidote to this is a continuing UK-wide furlough scheme dovetailing with an active plan for jobs in Scotland.”
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