Oh I don’t disagree. They want to work. But what work will they do? Let’s say you own a restaurant. You can get a loan to rehire the staff. But you can’t open your restaurant. You don’t even know how long until your revenues return to “normal”. Why would you take the risk of borrowing to pay employees without knowing what your run rate will look like?
This would apply across the board to all business sectors. Small manufacturers and workshops. Everyone wants to get back to work. But what work will they do? Are the customers prepared to start buying again?
I suggest the recovery will be very slow, unfortunately. It is too uncertain right now to predict when any business will get back to where things were in November 2019 for example. So why would you borrow money to pay people to do little to no work? You wouldn’t until you had some certainty. So I suggest it will recover in fits and starts, and resume with scaled back staff and part time shifts for a while. But Congress has demanded that to get a loan you need to rehire what is it 90% or 95% of your staff? I certainly would not borrow money to hire 95% of a workforce when they have little work to do, when my top line income is uncertain, and my overhead costs are fixed. This is an opportunity for businesses to rethink the way they operate, and to not rehire 95% of their work force.
IMO you need a sort of top-down indirect relief program. First, ensure that the businesses can stay in place “frozen in time” if you will. Reduce their risk. They need money to keep the doors open, to pay their bills and their leases and their creditors. Only then can they have breathing room to hire employees. If in May a business can get back to 30% capacity, and grow 10% a month, it will take the rest of the year to get to ‘normal’. No way you would hire 95% of the staff to do 30%, 40%, 50% of the business.
Thought the link was a pretty good summary.