By Stuart Mackinnon

 

The cloakroom and security staff welcoming punters back to city nightclubs in Glasgow this week won’t have been working from home over the last 18 months.

These workers will either be returning from furlough, or are new recruits. And if the patterns we’ve seen elsewhere in hospitality persist, it won’t have been easy for the businesses they work for to ensure there’s enough people to pour shots, pick tunes and polish the glitterball.

The next morning – maybe a street over – you might see a trickle of office workers consuming take-away coffee as they flash lanyards and try to smile at colleagues through their facemasks.

They might be thrilled to be out the house, or could already be fed up with their commute. The figures suggest that these workers are much less likely to have been furloughed and may have been plugging away from the kitchen table for the past 18 months.

READ MORE: Food sector staff shortages to make for a lean festive season

Another group whose work was deemed key might be bemused to see city streets busier, reminding them of the hours they’ve spent turning up while others stayed at home.

Our stories of work, or a lack of it, over the past year and a half are all different. Though it is hard to spot who has had it easy, it is easy to see that many people had it hard.

And the tricky thing is that although many of us long for this crisis to be over, the repercussions for the world of work look like they’re just beginning.

The latest furlough figures show that 141,000 people in Scotland are still being supported by the furlough scheme. As the initiative winds down, six per cent of the country’s workforce (and as high as 8% in Glasgow) will need to transition back into their old job or find a new one.

While a larger share of younger people were supported by the job retention scheme earlier on in the crisis, a lot of these people have gone back to active employment. This spells a potential problem for older workers.

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Similarly, while more women were furloughed than men, slightly more men haven’t yet returned.

This week will see more firms re-opening their doors and bringing back staff. But it looks likely that when the scheme winds down completely at the end of September, at least some firms won’t be able to bring back all their workers. The events industry, for example, has been knocked for six by the crisis and there’s likely to be some casualties.

The loss of a job is heart-wrenching at the best of times, and it’s life-changing when it isn’t just your job or company that has gone, but large parts of your industry or local economy as well.

The good news is that business optimism across the board is rising, and two-fifths of Scottish businesses say they have plans to grow in the year ahead, while only a fifth warn of downsizing. However, these FSB's figures also show that a third of businesses with ambitions to expand fear that a shortage of skilled staff is a barrier to realising their ambitions.

READ MORE: Scots job worries as furlough scheme begins to wind down

The challenge we have ahead of us is to connect the workers made redundant because of the crisis with the businesses thriving in its aftermath. Previous economic upheavals suggest that this is far from easy, but if we put as much effort into the recovery as we did into the crisis and vaccination roll-out, then there’s no reason that we can’t succeed.

Nine in ten people who moved from unemployment back into the workplace after the financial crash of 2008 did so through a small business or self-employment. So policymakers’ labour market and skills policies need to be built with local and independent firms in mind, not exclusively around the public sector and big business.

We’ll also need to nurture the entrepreneurs that emerge from this crisis, no matter if they want to create the next world-beating company or spend more time with their family.

As our nighttime industry y re-opens fully, the Covid jobs hangover might only be beginning. But by tapping the potential of local businesses, we can lessen the impact on individuals and local economies.

Stuart Mackinnon is deputy head of external affairs for the FSB in Scotland.