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Comment by benjohnson | Hacker News Reader

Sure!

The 2008 recession clobbered my IT company - most of our customers were in the construction field and many of them went bankrupt.

We did the right thing - we cut deep into the workforce to protect what we could and that was the right thing to do. The remaining employees were able to confidently work knowing that their job was secure.

But the act of cutting deeply, and laying off people I liked and admired cause me to want to act like a turtle and to not want to venture out.

In hindsight, I should have marketed and reached out to new potential customers because other IT support companies were going out of business left and right. I estimate that my timidity after the traumatic cuts cause my company four years of growth.

If I have to do it again, I will. But afterwards I'll act like it never happened - I'll keep growing the company.

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In Germany, and other European countries, there is a tool called "Kurzarbeit". It allows a company to reduce the workforces hours and temporarily cut pay. The state supports it with tax breaks. The result is that a worker only works i.e. 60%, income drops to 80% (bc of the tax breaks) and the company saves a lot of money.

The key point: people keep their jobs AND companies keep their trained staff. So when the crisis is over, they are ready to ramp up again. Also, since people keep their jobs, consumption does not drop that low.

This helped the Germany economy massively to recover from the 2008 crisis.

Not sure if it would work the same way for all parts of the economy, but it definitively works for the manufacturing industry.

I'm German, so I might be biased but I think Kurzarbeit (for our non-german speakers, it is pronounced: koorts-arbite [0]) (short-time working) is as close as possible to an economic wonder weapon during a recession:

People are still paid, companies do not have the full burden of wages to pay and especially do not have to go through hiring and training new employees after the episode when they want to ramp up again. It's an awesome tool to deal with a temporary situation and particularly aimed at making recovery from the situation easier (by riding it out instead of first succumbing to it and then having to get back on the feet).

[0] Hear it using the speaker symbol to the right of the german word at https://www.dict.cc/?s=kurzarbeit&=DEEN

PS: I wanted to point others to it a few days ago but unfortunately it did not catch on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649108

Same in the Netherlands. There was always something similar, but as part of a stimulus package for the Corona crisis the government will pay part of the wages for companies that have 20%+ revenue loss, and this scales up to 90% wage payment for 100% revenue loss.

I’ve been telling my sales staff at every meeting that now is the time to push when others are panicked. Demonstrate your reliability and professionalism. It’s working..

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