Are JobKeeper Contributions
masking concerning statistics in your business

I was on a recent webinar, with Employment Law Specialist, Danny King (Danny King Legal)

She spoke about the concerning statistics JobKeeper could be masking for your business.
Here’s what she said –

Just because you’re getting JobKeeper, doesn’t mean you should continue blindly into the JobKeeper sphere and not think about the consequences for your business as the pandemic continues.

It might be really important for you to have a good hard look at your resourcing of your business and whether you really need to restructure it, or not. This is a question of business survival, and the JobKeeper contributions might be masking some very concerning statistics within your business that you are either choosing not to see, or it just hasn’t really come up in your attention yet.

For those of you who are thinking, “Oh, that might be me”, these are the things to look for:

• Think about whether you have any reasonable prospect of coming back to a pre-COVID level of work within your business.
• Has the market for your product or service changed?
• Is there going to be the ability to actually use all of the people that you’ve currently got that are being supported through JobKeeper when the dust settles?

If the answer is no, the time to act is now.

Whilst JobKeeper continues to be paid into your business account that is helping fund the current liability to your employees for their wages; and you might have jumped through the hoops that you need to reduce the amount that you actually pay, the full-time entitlements continue to accrue. Every single day, you’re chipping out a little bit extra annual leave, long service leave, personal leave onto your long term liability; onto your balance sheet. And when it comes time to actually rip the band-aid off, if you have been complacent for six months, then that six months can be a very significant increase in termination entitlements at the end that might actually be the nail in the coffin for your business.

It is so important not to think, “Oh, it’s okay, I’ve got JobKeeper coming in and I can just cruise for a bit,” that is not the case at all, you need to be very focused on what your business needs you to do and jump through the hoops that you need to in order to do a restructure.