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Comment by neilwilson | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t it be more appropriate just to hire people and set them to work in the NHS?

It’s way past time the government stopped messing around and just hired all the spare labour - which can then be directed to assist the NHS or directed to stay at home as required.

When there are so many people without work that want it we need to stop QE’ing Gilts and start QE’ing workers hours instead.

All this could be done with an off the shelf PAYE system and a few scripts to generate the BACS file to hand over to the BoE.

It fixes the layoffs, redundancies and the lack of work for the self employed and it will automatically back off when things recover.

Pay people and they spend it - keeping the economic circulation ticking over.

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Contract hours, minimum pay, tax implications for pensioners, availability. Sometimes things are more complicated than just writing a script. This is quicker and can be disbanded just as fast.

It's funny to see that the government regulations on employing people make it too hard for the government to bother going through with them, so they try to find a backdoor by hiring volunteers instead. One would think that the government will think on their feet and relax the burden at least in the time of life-threatening crisis.

These burdens are put in place to prevent employer (as in superiors, not the folks you serve) abuse. They would abuse government servants here and there if it were easily replaced.

You mean like instead of abusing them by asking them to volunteer?

There is a big difference between being abused by your employer, on which you depend with your livelihood, and being a volunteer, who can literally walk away anytime without consequences.

I fail to see how a scenario where you can walk away any time and are being paid could ever be more abusive than a scenario where you can walk away at any time and are not being paid.

Not everyone works in cushy software-engineering jobs like us. minimum wage workers most of the time do not have a choice: its either work this job or none.

I urge you to not assume your position is the standard and to see beyond your nose.

In the UK you can't walk away anytime unless you have a job to go to, because making yourself intentionally unemployed means you have severely limited access to benefits.

You can also walk away anytime from employment without consequences. You just stop making money. At least that's how it is in America. Is UK government regulation different?

How is “not making money” not a consequence, exactly?

It is a consequence, but it is a consequence of both employment and volunteering.

No, it is a consequence of not being employed which is clearly what I wrote above and why you cant compare those situations.

That is not true in the UK. Walking away 'any time' can seriously impact your potential to get another job.

How are you abused if I give you an option to volunteer?

Sure, I get why the regulations are there. However, here they clearly fail to serve their purpose. Are they going to protect volunteers from abuse? If not, then why should they be allowed to even use volunteer help? If the argument is that volunteers can just walk away when they don't like the conditions, why not simply give the same opportunity to paid workers? My point here is that regardless of whether the regulations have good reason or not, trying to work around them by hiring volunteers is utterly ludicrous.

Emergency powers should override that.

Can't wait until the next financial meltdown (no, not this one) and worker rights are rolled back because it's an "emergency".

What's happening now isn't just a financial crisis.

There's a very obvious and very real additional factor at play here.

And here's the Bill that is aimed at doing just that, amongst a whole bunch of other things. Emergency volunteering, changes to business leases, relaxation of rules about claiming NHS pensions while working for the NHS, retention of DNA samples, changes to funerals, fewer double-checking measures on mental health orders, suspension of free movement and association, wartime arrest and detention powers, ...

* https://services.parliament.uk/Bills/2019-21/coronavirus/doc...

Sure.

But those complications can be set aside for the moment, and anyone caught abusing the normal regulations can be dealt with severely later.

People who don't want any money often provide the best service (and in this case will most likely also have the lowest likelihood of carrying the virus).

Aka: people who already have money provide the best free services.

I would recommend volunteering even to people who aren't wealthy. It has to do with what you said, most people who volunteer are doing so because they have the money to do it instead of work at that moment. So, volunteering potentially puts you around wealthy people who may provide opportunities to you in the future. Not always the case of course, but I would still be pretty broke if it weren't for some job opportunities I found through people I knew from volunteering for nonprofits.

Admittedly not everyone can afford to volunteer

There's an additional reason to volunteer if you can:

Volunteering can be good for your mental health, see https://duckduckgo.com/?q=volunteering+improves+mental+healt...

Nono, volunteers have better health than non-volunteers.

Volunteers have enough wealth to volunteer (or, as stated, can get hooked up with better opportunities, but gotta jump over that first barrier).

Lots of things you would need to (obviously) control for.

Dunno if I’ll ever see a double-blinded randomized trial on volunteering though.

Do we have to keep arguing about the mental health benefits of socialising, getting out, moving about, contributing to something?

The only people who are arguing "more research is needed" are social science professors and their PhD candidates.

Yeah, sure, if your mental health is so poor you can't leave the house, it goes without saying those who can get out of the house do, be default, have better mental health. That doesn't mean those people aren't deriving any additional benefit.

You don't have to be wealthy to volunteer, you can be homeless and living on government allowances and still volunteer.

> The only people who are arguing "more research is needed" are social science professors and their PhD candidates.

> Dunno if I’ll ever see a double-blinded randomized trial on volunteering though.

Social scientists generally don't do these kinds of studies. A more typical research question might be something like "what forms of volunteering do italian grandpas take part in, and what are the perceived benefits do these efforts for themselves and the communities they serve?" This would be addressed through open-ended semi-structured interviews through various sampling methods, but probably a snowball sampling strategy. The research goes in the directions that the subjects lead it in, with effort being made to tie up loose ends as part of a theory-building process. Basically a structured and evidence-based attempt to come up with a coherent explanation.

Not if they need money; then they have a way of disappearing when a paying gig shows up.

Interestingly before covid-19 the Government were pushing for more decentralisation and all the work around ICS / STP was going ahead. But during pandemic there's been a move away from localism and a push towards central control. Having said that, here's why it's not "The NHS".

It's a collection of hundreds of legally separate organisations. A doctor goes to work for eg Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, or for Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, they don't go to work for "The NHS".

In 2017 there were:

  207 clinical commissioning groups,
  135 acute non-specialist trusts (including 84 foundation trusts),
  17 acute specialist trusts (including 16 foundation trusts),
  54 mental health trusts (including 42 foundation trusts),
  35 community providers (11 NHS trusts, 6 foundation trusts,
  17 social enterprises and 1 limited company),
  10 ambulance trusts (including 5 foundation trusts), and
  7,454 GP practices.

(There have recently been a bunch of mergers because of ICS / STP work, so this list is wrong).

The largest is probably Barts Health NHS Trust, which employs about 15,000 people. The smallest is probably Weston Area Health NHS Trust which I think employs about 1,700 people.

These organisations are legally separate. They have their own board of directors. They employ their own staff.

To change this we'd have to roll-back the Lansley Reforms, and that's too hard to do even when we're not going through pandemic.

I know many people already in full time work volunteering to do this, and their work supports them.

> “Pay people and they spend it - keeping the economic circulation ticking over.”

There isn’t actually much to spend it on right now, other than rent, groceries, and online entertainment. Everything else is closed and my bank balance is actually looking much more healthy than it normally would this far into the month!

The issue is many people who have been laid off need money for _exactly_ those things. For tech workers the quarantine is a minor inconvenience at best. For those less fortunate, it is existential.

A lot of people can't pay rent now, and people are starting to talk about how many days groceries they can afford before they run out.

Some people, like you, have a bank balance getting healthier.

But others have the opposite. Those people could really do with being paid somehow while they are supporting the NHS.

They are not asking for trained medical staff but basically for neighborhood help in an emergency situation.

And it is not really NHS' fault that people tend not to know their neighbors anymore and thus need an app that matches their willingness to help with a recipient...

I agree. The cost will be minimal compared to the truly gargantuan package of measures announced so far, and would be a great way to help the self-employed now looking for work (who currently get nothing).

I recently thought the US should look into taping the Census apparatus - which is already scaling up to hundreds of thousands - for contact tracing and more.

What will they spend it on?

They can't go out, can't spend it on anything but essentials and some percentage of those essentials are difficult to get anyway.

> What will they spend it on?

Essentials, rent, utilities, insurance, vehicle costs, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, entertainment, gambling, software, online gaming, anything that can be picked up or delivered from industries that are still operating. Maybe they'll save some of it and spend it latter, or invest it now or later.

Rent?

The government has not declared a rent holiday ..

> What will they spend it on?

Amazon.

Prioritising essentials and even it is out of stock of some stuff you'd want.

I agree with everything here except the reference to QE. Quantitative Easing works to control the money supply only because the central bank can quickly mop the money back up by selling the bonds it previously bought. The central bank can't mop up money it sent to people as wages, so if inflation started, they would have no leverage.

The QE money never has been mopped up, nor can it be mopped up quickly. QE has caused asset price inflation. Also, QE is already back in effect, they're just not calling it QE.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

By contrast, paying wages to otherwise idle workers isn't going to make much of a dent in the CPI. If it did, there would be a clear correlation between unemployment rate and consumer prices.

There’s no operational difference between selling old Gilts back to the market and the ability to issue new ones. Under expectations they work the same way.

Spending is automatically recovered by taxation of the flow. If the central bank spends on wages, the Treasury will end up running a surplus.

It's a good idea,but would require an act of congress Edit: Or relevant funding institution for the UK

In the UK?

In the U.K. there is already a Bill in Parliament, very likely to become an Act by Thursday.

* https://services.parliament.uk/Bills/2019-21/coronavirus/doc...

Emergency volunteers are sections 8 and 9, and a bunch of stuff in the schedules.

Act of congress is a very common idiom, and widely understood by many who have similar systems of democratic government. Don't be that guy.

Ah yes, forgot calling out pedantry hits too close to home with one of the world's most pedantic communities.

If you say "Act of Congress" in the UK everyone will either not know what you are talking about or assume you are referring to the USA.

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