Daily Archives: March 31, 2020

Forced inside by the danger of coronavirus, where do we turn to for a sense of escape?

The answer, for many, is video games. Gaming statistics have skyrocketed in recent weeks in the US, Verizon reported an increase of 75 per cent since the quarantine began with people increasingly relying on their consoles and computers for diversion.

Even though a lot of people will be content to stick with old favourites such as Fifa, Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto while waiting for the lockdown to end, others may want something a little more off the beaten track.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

This is a list of games that are well worth checking out over the coming weeks, be they lesser-known independent gems such as Kentucky Route Zero or games with particular resonance during the time of self-isolation, like Death Stranding.

Here are 17 games to play while self-isolating...

There are few games more antidotal to the stress of the current global crisis than Animal Crossing. Suffused with good cheer, New Horizons provides you with the perfect(admittedly kid-focused) sense of community while youre stuck inside your house.

New Horizons uses a real-time calendar system to mimic seasonal weather patterns (Nintendo)

With everybody stuck inside, it can sometimes feel like society is on the brink of a breakdown. In Cities: Skylines, you can construct your own virus-free metropolitan utopia, with a terrific amount of customisation available.

Theres more than a whiff of The X Files to Remedy Entertainments acclaimed 2019 shooter Control. Playing as Jesse Faden, you must explore the Federal Bureau of Control and defeat a sinister force known as The Hiss. Remedy has always excelled at gunplay, and the action here is thrilling.

This immersive RPG(role-playing game) tells the story of a shambling, drug-addled detective in a sci-fi dystopia who investigates a lynching near a dockworkers union. Inspired by TV series such as The Wire and The Shield, as well as artists such asRembrandt, Disco Elysium is dense and compelling.

In Hideo Kojimas ambitious, spiritual epic Death Stranding, you control a post-apocalyptic deliveryman transporting cargo across treacherous but beautiful landscape. Death Stranding is a game about connection; it speaks so specifically to this age of self-isolation that some players have even started calling it prophecy.

Norman Reedus and La Seydoux in Hideo Kojimas sci-fi epic Death Stranding (Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Media Molecules Dreams is a brilliant-but-complicated game creation system; self-isolation might just give you the time you need to really get to grips with its impressively detailed workings or to play through the ever-expanding database of content made by others.

No doubt many of us are currently dreaming of escape and freedom; Inside is a game that holds this yearning to its core. Created by the team behind the indie hit Limbo, this puzzle-platform game is even weirder than its predecessor but no less enjoyable.

Spread across five acts, this contemplative, unendingly surprising point-and-click game is nothing short of a masterpiece. Developed and released over the span of a decade, Kentucky Route Zero explores weighty themes of addiction and wage slavery with the pithy postmodernism of a Don DeLillo novel.

Kentucky Route Zero tackles big themes with a solemn musical brilliance (Cardboard Computer)

OK, so nobody could argue that Naughty Dogs hugely successful post-apocalyptic thriller qualifies as a hidden gem. But theres never been a better time to revisit The Last of Us, with the sequel just months away and the world outside increasingly resembling Joel and Ellies desperate reality it might even be cathartic.

The classic block-building game has made its educational editions free to download while children worldwide are cooped up without school. But the original version of the game is still a great shout in times of trouble its sublimely peaceful and you can pour countless hours of your time into it.

Nioh took the tricky combat design of the Dark Souls franchise and smoothly transposed it to 17th-century Japan. This years prequel, Nioh 2, is even better: a hard, rewarding action RPG with a great setting and plenty of depth.

Nioh 2 colours its historical Japanese setting with dynamic action and great RPG elements (Sony Interactive Entertainment)

With a sweeping soundtrack and appealing characters, Ori and the Will of the Wisps sometimes feels like a Pixar film, in all the best ways. But this delightful platformer isnt just for kids as its formidable difficulty suggests.

Strategy game Plague Inc. was removed from the Chinese app store recently, seemingly on grounds of taste, but this virus simulator actually offers a genuine education on the ways viruses are disseminated through society. After a coronavirus-related sales boom, the games creators donated more than 200,000 to help fight the pandemic.

For those looking for something a bit different, Lucas Popes Return of the Obra Dinn is a fantastic puzzle game like no other. You play an insurance salesman investigating a ghost ship; the aim of the game is to identify all the Obra Dinns passengers and crew and determine how they died.

A ship is attacked by a beast from the deep in Lucas Popes retro-inspired Return of the Obra Dinn (3909 via MobyGames)

If you feel like you dont have much control over your own life at the moment, you can at least have total dominion over the lives of others, in this sensationally popular simulation game. And as anyone whos played it can attest, the hours fly by at triple speed when The Sims manages to get its hooks into you.

Stellarisputs you in command of a species who have just cracked the science of interstellar travel. If youre looking for a way to kill some serious time, you can hardly do better than this sprawling strategy game, which forces you to juggle diplomacy, exploration and warfare to build the ultimatespace empire.

While a game like Animal Crossing is a great reminder of the pleasures society can bring you, Untitled Goose Game is all about shaking that society up. As a havoc-wreaking goose, you dont know the meaning of the phrase social distancing you honk, peck and flap your way around a small English village, leaving a trail of frustrated farm folk in your wake.

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The best video games to play while self-isolating - The Independent

It is difficult to believe that it has only been a few weeks since I left Duke for spring break with the (perhaps naive) assumption that I would return. In that short time, with the shift to online classes, student evacuation/evictions and stay-at-home orders, our lives have been upended in the wake of the coronavirus.

And yet, cutting through the chaos and confusion, a kind of clarity emerges. Coronavirus has laid bare the greatest cruelties of capitalism, white supremacy and the status quo. But it has also opened up a window into an alternative world.

Cities throughout the country are declaring eviction moratoriums while organizers push for rent freezes, exposing how landlords profit off gentrification, redlining and the hard-earned income of the working class. Although weve known for years that there are more empty homes than houseless people, only now are houseless people finally getting a roof over their heads.

But, when the virus is contained, will we go back to evicting people who cant afford rent or harassing houseless people who have nowhere to go? Or will COVID-19 make us realize that we should have never put a price on the human right to housing in the first place?

And for incarcerated people, who are disproportionately low-income Black and brown people, social distancing is an impossibility in prisons with inhumane living conditions, inadequate meals and abysmal medical care. My home state of New York is opportunistically capitalizing on this crisis to use prison labor, or modern-day slavery, to make hand sanitizer.

Many people are beginning to realize the inherent inhumanity of locking people up during a pandemic and are urging for the release of non-violent, low-risk prisoners. But the coronavirus should challenge us to act as prison abolitionists have for decades in challenging the existence of prisons themselvesand how they function in maintaining white supremacy, carceral violence, and punitive (in)justice.

For years, nationalized healthcare, student debt elimination and reparations were all dismissed as pipe dreams, impossible to fund, and yet the government magically materialized trillions of dollars out of thin air to pump into the stock market. The money was always there, but the American ruling class uses it not to help people but instead to perpetuate white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism. How can we change things so that our society actually serves its people?

A little closer to home, this is a moment when the foundations of the university can be dismantled and reimagined, lest we reproduce Duke exactly the same as it was before, just on Zoom this time.

My hope is that Dukes response to the coronavirus may serve as a wake-up call to what campus activists and organizers have been saying for years. For example, instead of stepping in like UNC or Emory by establishing funds to assist students financially during COVID-19, Duke and its 8.6 billion dollar endowment has, yet again, left it up to students to self-organize and assist one another.

The campus shutdown has exacerbated the precarity of contract workers at Duke, who are not considered employees of the university and frequently do not get paid the $15 minimum wage Duke pledged to in 2017, and workers have pressured the administration to make some commitments to pay them amid a global health crisis. So many unskilled workers such as grocery clerks, farmworkers, delivery drivers and sanitation workers, whose labor was constantly devalued and discounted are now considered essential workerswhen they have served as the backbone of society this entire time.

The same goes for these contract workers, without whom the university would not be able to function. But after COVID-19, will Dukes contract workers get the adequate pay and respect that they deserve?

As Duke transitions to S/U grading, this crisis should make it clear that the playing field has never been level, not even at Duke, and grades are less a measure of intelligence than access to resources. The question shouldnt be should I pass/fail my class or still get a letter grade, but why do we even have grades at all?

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Many people are waiting for this all to be over, yearning for stability and a return to normalcy. However, it is very likely that nothing will be the same in the post-coronavirus world. Moreover, the coronavirus has torn away the thin veil of capitalism, revealing the naked exploitation that underwrites our stability and normalcy. We cannot return to that world.

Capitalism is sick and decaying, but socialism will not rise from the ashes by default. We can allow the ruling class to implement enhanced techno-surveillance (heard of Zoom lately?), summon the military to prevent civil disturbances and bailout corporations once again. We can allow Duke to continue offloading labor onto student organizers and shortchanging workers. Or we fight for a new, better world.

So, what is to be done? In short, organize!

Mutual aid efforts have sprouted up across the country, as tangible steps towards building the infrastructure and relationships of trust and care necessary in a kinder, more just world. Tenants are building power together and organizing themselves in anticipation of rent strikes to come. Campaigns to abolish ICE and the prison-industrial complex are more urgent than ever. Every aspect of the status quo has been impacted by COVID-19, but every aspect of the status quo can also be changed. Now is the time to demand the impossible.

It feels like the coronavirus is something that we ordinary people cant do much to impact besides washing our hands diligently and staying home. Passing the days by in quarantine can make us feel like passive, if not powerless, observersor perhaps hostages. But we all have much more power than we might think. And in this moment, solidarity and collective care are our best medicine.

Annie Yang is a Trinity senior. Her column, planting seeds, runs on alternate Mondays.

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COVID-19 and demanding the impossible - Duke Chronicle

The following is a guest version of Unsanitized from Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor of law at UC Irvine School of Law, and author of How the Other Half Banks and The Color of Money. She is also a Prospect board member.

Experts studying climate change, growing inequality, wage stagnation, and unsustainable debt have for years been trying to warn the public that, even though life seems normal for many people, these issues signal a critical crisis and ongoing epidemics. Communities across the US are suffering an epidemic of drug addiction, an epidemic of deaths of despair arising from poverty, an epidemic of anxiety because of the student loan crisis. Wave after wave of famines, crop failures, and wildfire crises (and now, an ominous swarm of locusts) have their origins in climate change. Yet business went on as usual, as the crises and epidemics raged slowly in the background.

Now, a global pandemic threatens all of us at once. The coronavirus has generated a tragedy of epic proportions; many lives will be lost in a short amount of time. Yet still, the other less acute epidemics will continue to rage on, unless we take this long pause as an opportunity to consider whether we want to reemerge from this crisis back to the way we were, or whether we want to shape a new way forward.

There are a few connected realities that have emerged from this crisis, which can guide us as we try to deal with our previous, ongoing crises:

First, our actions affect other people even when we arent aware. What were all learning during this pandemic is that, as we go about our normal lives, we put other people in grave danger. So it has always been with climate changeeach time we overconsume, buy gas, and basically maintain our current state of economic growth, we contribute to a warming planet that is causing climate disasters all over the world. All of our individual and collective actions can cause dislocation, death, famine, and scarcity. Our lives and fates have always been linked, because the earths resources are not unlimited. Each one of us who takes more than our share of resources causes harm somewhere else.

Second, the imperatives of economic growth conflict with lives lost. Our president has signaled that he would not let the coronavirus cure be worse than the disease. Other commenters, many of whom are not fans of the president, have been echoing this line of thinking. They characterize it as a trade-off; social isolation is going to hammer the economy as it slows the spread of the virus. Others have put it more crudely: sacrificing a portion of the population to death might be better than watching the stock market tank.

But the tension between human well-being and market well-being has always existed. The current structure of our economy relies on perpetual GDP growth, which requires that we favor a return on capital rather than human flourishing or ecological health. Usually, some group of humans has to sacrifice their labor, their land, or their health for the sake of economic growth. The drive toward profits has led to slavery, labor exploitation, sweatshops, and our current winner-takes-all economy. Economic growth has always come at a cost, whether manifested in the famines and starvations of the colonized world or todays corporate exploitation of labor and resources. People continue to die prematurely and live brutal lives of poverty and endless work.

Third, we can stop the status quo if we need to. To watch the entire world grind to a halt has been jarring and scary and disorienting. To see rigid rules and institutions adapt has also been stunning. Schools have quickly gone online, in-person meetings have become webinars and conference calls, and travel has been cancelled. We adapted quickly. We can live another way. We can consume less, take fewer carbon-emitting trips, and relax our work lives. This sudden and dramatic adaptability will be necessary as we consider our carbon future and attempt to halt a growth-based economy.

Fourth, downturns hit the economically vulnerable the hardest, and those at the bottom of the economy happen to be its most essential parts. About 40% of Americans could not access $500 if they faced an unexpected expense. Many Americans who work full-time cannot afford food and shelter if they go without wages for a month or two. Many of these workers also happen to be the grocery store clerks, nurses, sanitation workers, and delivery men and women we are all relying on right now. A deep irony of our economy has been that the workers who work the most in the hardest jobs earn the lowest salaries. In our current market system, firms are by law and design focused exclusively on earning profits for their shareholders. By squeezing their companies for maximum profits, investors and managers have replaced well-paid employees with benefits with low-wage or temporary workers to lower their costs of production. Meanwhile, shareholders have engaged in stock buybacks, evaded taxes through offshore loopholes, and lobbied for more tax cuts and subsidies, increasing the holdings of their billionaire owners. As increased wealth has accumulated at the top, the financial lives of the majority of Americans have become more precarious. The growing wealth of the 1 percent has come at the expense of the involuntary sacrifice of their workers. These so-called low skilled employees are now the main essential workers in the economy.

We were always on an unsustainable path. We have always been inflicted by ongoing pandemics. Perhaps we can use this time to consider what kind of world we want to emerge into. This crisis is already a tragedy of unprecedented proportions, but it would be an even greater tragedy if we did not use it as a wake-up call to address our nations ongoing epidemics.

The numbers are getting grim. As of this morning, the New York Times shows 123,617 U.S. cases (102,636 yesterday) and 2,133 deaths (1,646). Johns Hopkins University shows 124,686 cases (104,860) and 2,191 deaths (1,711). The death toll has doubled in just two days, a terrible sign if it continues. The COVID-19 Tracker shows 121,468 cases (101,369) and 2.045 deaths (1,593), with better news on testing: 762,015 tests completed (645,669 yesterday). Over 220,000 tests have been completed in the past two days, which is great. But Bill McBride asks some good questions about putting the increased testing capacity to use: who will handle tracking, follow-ups, database management, etc., so we can actually implement a test-and-trace system that will allow most people to return to their lives?

Read this article:

Unsanitized: A Crisis to End All Crises - The American Prospect

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet millions of American families have had to set up crowdfunding sites to try to raise money for their loved ones medical bills. Millions more can buy unleaded gasoline for their car, but they cant get unleaded water in their homes. Almost half of Americas workerswhether in Appalachia or Alabama, California or Carolinawork for less than a living wage. And as school buildings in poor communities crumble for lack of investment, Americas billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than the poorest half of households.

With the coronavirus pandemic bringing our countrys equally urgent poverty crisis into stark relief, we cannot simply wait for change. It must come now.

This moral crisis is coming to a head as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare Americas deep injustices. While the virus itself does not discriminate, it is the poor and disenfranchised who will experience the most suffering and death. Theyre the ones who are least likely to have health care or paid sick leave, and the most likely to lose work hours. And though children appear less vulnerable to the virus than adults, Americas nearly forty million poor and low-income children are at serious risk of losing access to food, shelter, education, and housing in the economic fallout from the pandemic.

The underlying disease, in other words, is poverty, which was killing nearly 700 of us every day in the worlds wealthiest country, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19.

The moral crisis of poverty amid vast wealth is inseparable from the injustice of systemic racism, ecological devastation, and our militarized war economy. It is only a minority rule sustained by voter suppression and gerrymandering that subverts the will of the people. To redeem the soul of Americaand survive a pandemicwe must have a moral fusion movement that cuts across race, gender, class, and cultural divides.

The United States has always been a nation at odds with its professed aspirations of equality and justice for allfrom the genocide of original inhabitants to slavery to military aggression abroad. But there have been periods in our history when courageous social movements have made significant advances. We must learn from those whove gone before us as we strive to build a movement that can tackle todays injusticesand help all of us survive.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, African Americans who had just escaped slavery joined with white allies to form coalitions that won control of nearly every southern legislature. These Reconstruction-era political alliances enacted new constitutions that advanced moral agendas, including, for the first time, the right to public education.

During the Great Depression, farmers, workers, veterans, and others rose up to demand bold government action to ease the pain of the economic crisis on ordinary Americans. This led to New Deal policies, programs, and public works projects that we still benefit from today, such as Social Security and basic labor protections.

Pushed by these movements, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt even called in 1944 for an economic bill of rights, declaring: We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our peoplewhether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenthis ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

During what I like to call the Second Reconstruction over the following decades, a coalition of blacks and progressive whites began dismantling the racist Jim Crow laws and won key legislative victories, including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act.

With each period of advancement has come a formidable backlash. This is how we find ourselves today, in the year 2020, with levels of economic inequality as severe as during the original Gilded Age a century ago. Since the Supreme Courts 2013 Shelby decision, Americans have had fewer voting rights protections than we did fifty-five years ago, while thanks to the earlier Citizens United ruling, corporations can invest unlimited sums of money to influence elections.

In response to fair tax reforms, the wealthy have used their economic clout to slash their IRS bills, cutting the top marginal income tax rate from more than 90 percent in the 1950s to 37 percent today. In response to the hard-fought wins of the labor movement, corporate lobbyists have rammed through one anti-worker law after another, slashing the share of U.S. workers protected by unions nearly in half, from 20.1 percent in 1983 to just 10.5 percent in 2018.

Decades after Depression-era reforms, Wall Street fought successfully to deregulate the financial system, paving the way for the 2008 financial crash that caused millions to lose their homes and livelihoods. And the ultra-rich and big corporations have also managed to dominate our campaign finance system, making it easier for them to buy off politicians who commit to rigging the rules against the poor and the environment, and to suppress voting rights, making it harder for the poor to fight back.

Our military budgets continue to rise, now grabbing more than fifty-three cents of every discretionary federal dollar to pay for wars abroad and pushing our ability to pay for health care for all, for a Green New Deal, for jobs and education, and infrastructure, further and further away.

In short, the official measure of poverty doesnt begin to touch the depth and breadth of economic hardship in the worlds wealthiest nation, where 40 percent of us cant afford a $400 emergency.

The wars that those military budgets fund continue to escalate. They dont make us safer, and theyve led to the deaths of thousands of poor people in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and beyond, as well as the displacement of millions of refugees, the destruction of water sources, and the contamination of the environments of whole countries.

The only ones who benefit are the millionaire CEOs of military companies, who are getting richer every year on the more than $350 billionhalf the military budgetthat goes directly to their corporations. In the meantime 23,000 low-ranking troops earn so little that they and their families qualify for food stamps.

Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservednessthat they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior.

Its also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we neednt worry about the rich getting richereven while our real social safety net is full of gaping holes. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship.

The way the U.S. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesnt tell us what we need to know. Its an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family sizeand its still the way we measure poverty today.

But this measure doesnt account for the costs of housing, child care, or health care, much less twenty-first-century needs like internet access or cell phone service. It doesnt even track the impacts of anti- poverty programs like Medicaid or the earned income tax credit, obscuring the role they play in reducing poverty.

In short, the official measure of poverty doesnt begin to touch the depth and breadth of economic hardship in the worlds wealthiest nation, where 40 percent of us cant afford a $400 emergency.

In a report with the Institute for Policy Studies, the Poor Peoples Campaign found that nearly 140 million Americans were poor or low-incomeincluding more than a third of white people, 40 percent of Asian people, approximately 60 percent each of indigenous people and black people, and 64 percent of Latinx people. LGBTQ people are also disproportionately affected.

Further, the very condition of being poor in the United States has been criminalized through a system of racial profiling, cash bail, the myth of the Reagan-era Welfare Queen, arrests for things such as laying ones head on a park bench, passing out food to unsheltered people, and extraordinary fines and fees for misdemeanors such as failing to use a turn signal, and simply walking while black or trans.

We are a nation crying out for security, equity, and justice. We need racial equity. We need good jobs. We need quality public education. We need a strong social safety net. We need health care to be understood as a human right for all of us. We need security for people living with disabilities. We need to be a nation that opens our hearts and neighborhoods to immigrants. We need safe and healthy environments where our children can thrive instead of struggling to survive.

With the coronavirus pandemic bringing our countrys equally urgent poverty crisis into stark relief, we cannot simply wait for change. It must come now.

America is an imperfect nation, but we have made important advancements against interconnected injustices in the past.

We can do it again, and we know how. Now is the time to fight for the heart and soul of this democracy.

Originally posted here:

The Real Epidemic is Poverty - Progressive.org

Now the initial wave of panic and uncertainty has passed, many big businesses will be thinking about how to prepare for an uncertain future.

Redundancies are often the first thing considered, and are enacted to cut costs, protect profits and please shareholders.

But as a KiwiSaver manager and shareholder in many of NZ's largest companies, our message is clear: Redundancies should be the last option.

Here are five simplereasons why.

READ MORE:* Full coronavirus coverage*Hundreds call cops to dob on lockdown cheats*At the going down of the sun

1. It fuels the recession.

Layoffs are the surest way of exacerbating a recession. The redundant worker loses income, and so do the supermarkets, cinemas, sports clubs, cafes and bars they spent money at. And it provides a bad example for others to justify their redundancies, turning it into an unnecessary downward spiral.

It's usually bad economics. The cost of redundancies is typically 3-6 months of an employees salary. That means it's 3-6 months before a company starts saving money from the redundancy.

DAVID WHITE/STUFF

Sam Stubbs is calling on businesses not to fuel the recession by laying off staff.

Most layoffs occur at the end of recession, not the beginning, so the companies often pay for the redundancy and find themselves re-hiring quite soon thereafter. The finance industry is notorious for this.

Underperforming companies are always restructuring in the good times, and firing their people quickly in the bad times. By contrast, great companies like Honeywell go to the nth degree to keep staff through the economic cycle.

2.It's bad for a companys' future.

The average time for an economic recession is 12-18 months. Given that this crash is caused by a virus, the recession may be savage, but also over faster than feared right now. Who knows. But however it pans out, in tough times companies often can't see the recovery just round the corner. And if they fire staff, when the recovery comes (and it will) they will be understaffed, and spend time and money rebuilding teams they fired in a panic.

3. It's bad for mental health.

There is nothing as demoralising, and destructive, as laying off an employee in a bad job market. Every worker typically has others dependant on their income. It's a blow to self esteem, and down right terrifying for some.

If companies believe they have any social license, it's first and foremost owed to the employees who depend on them. A company's culture is defined by how it treats its employees, especially in the bad times.

4. The Government is helping, big time.

Subsidies and loan support for all companies in trouble is a clear signal that the Government wants businesses to retain jobs, and they'll spend billions making that happen.

New Zealand Parliament

Finance Minister Grant Robertson unveils $12.1b package to help protect the economy against the coronavirus fallout.

For Government that's a sensible strategy, they may as well pay subsidies for salaries rather than in the form of benefits, and there is a simple dignity in someone keeping their job. It's good for shareholders too, because being fully staffed for the recovery means most businesses will make profits again sooner, and be paying taxes too.

5. Great and enduring companies are ultimately a combination of three things- an idea,money and people.

Great ideas are everywhere, you'll find most of them on the web. And money for good ideas is increasingly available. KiwiSaver managers alone will invest $70 billion in New Zealand in the next ten years. But great people are always hard to find, and nothing signals 'employees don't really matter around here' more than team mates losing their jobs early on.

As a shareholder in many of New Zealand's biggest companies, our perspective is very clear. Great companies value their employees first and foremost. From that will flow motivated teams delivering very satisfied customers and enduring profits. But let great people go, and what makes your company great goes too. As Richard Branson says, employees come first.

And there's no such thing as a company with demotivated staff delivering sustainable long term profits. That ended with slavery.

My business hero, Stephen Tindall, once said that a great person with an average idea is far more likely to succeed than an average person with a great idea. So keeping quality people matters most.

So how does a company adapt for recession without cutting jobs? History has shown some winning ways.

First, the CEO's and directors need to take a meaningful and public pay cut.

That's a strong signal about priorities, and will help save some jobs until better times.

CEO's and directors are no more entitled to their salary and job security than anyone else.

As leaders, they should take any pain first. Is it any wonder that Rod Duke runs Briscoes so successfully? He just took a 100 per centpay cut until things improve. Bravo.

SUPPLIED

Rod Duke, the head of Briscoes Group, has taken a 100 per cent pay cut until the coronavirus crisis is over.

By contrast, some CEO's have taken no pay cut, or have agreed to take one only as large as everyone else. That is not great leadership, because great leaders eat last.

Next, discretionary spending needs to be pared back. There are always ways to save money without cutting jobs. It's different for each business, but each one should know how.

Talk to your accountants and get advice. If a CEO hasn't done this before, many others have.

Next is tough conversations with creditors.

Banks have a big role to play here.

They make over $5 billion a year from Kiwis, so have a social license to do the right thing in tough times.

The Reserve Bank has just relaxed their capital requirements so they can be more lenient with lending, and the Government is underwriting 80 per centof the risk of many new loans. The banks have effectively had their success through this crisis underwritten by the Reserve Bank and Government. Remind them of that when re-negotiating your loans.

And if all that doesn't work, employees should be involved in planning how everyone can take some pain to save jobs. It might be unpaid leave for all, a four day week, or everyone taking a small salary or wage cut.

Any wage cuts should hurt more at the top than at the bottom, and there will be some on minimum wage for which any wage cut might be too big a deal. But where there's a will, there's usually a way.

Teams that survive the tough times intact will thrive when things improve. And remember, the economy has improved after every recession. Every single time.

As a KiwiSaver manager, we have a very clear message to the CEO's and directors of New Zealand's biggest companies, many of which we are invested in.

Right now it's better to have lower profits, or no profits, in order to keep your team employed. Doing so dampens the recession, so we all recover faster. And it's the right thing to do for the long term. Short term profits simply don't matter right now, keeping your team intact does.

We are stronger together. Kia Kaha.

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Sam Stubbs: Now is the time for employers to keep faith with workers - Stuff.co.nz