The question is how to pay staff.
Here’s what we have done so far:
Danyel has talked to each staff member finding out what they need. Some need to work. Some are taking their vacation pay and are staying home. And some just want to stay home with their families and are fine not being paid while they are gone. Without Danyel asking each of them what they wanted, we wouldn’t have known that some are fine not being paid.
What happens when those who are taking vacation pay run out of vacation pay? Danyel will talk with them again. She is working with them a week or two at a time. Their situations may change and as they change, we will respond to them to help them.
For those who want to work, we are keeping our staff separated from each other. Some will benefit from training. We’ll go into that into more detail in a future member advisory.
But my wife, Eleanor, came up with a unique method of paying staff for those who need more hours that we have available work. So let’s assume that a staff member is accustomed to being paid for 40 hours a week. And we only have 20 hours of work for that staff member to do. How does that staff member get paid? We give that staff member a loan for the remaining 20 hours at what the staff member would have netted (after tax dollars)
When we go back to work, we’ll likely be working longer days and hours to make up for this period. So, in this example the person working 40 hours a week may work 50 hours in a week. The additional 10 hours are paid at time and a half. We pay the staff member the full pay and take out taxes on the 50 hours. The staff member returns to us the additional 10 hours of pay to pay off the loan.
The only way this will work is if your staff member works hours over and above his or her normal number of hours when you return. And again, we will need to discuss this with each staff member.
You should run this by your accountant. We did, and it is legal.
The rough draft of the loan agreement is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1syyhpdvbt1KgklsfJsJ1SKfXBLAsDOBdvoc0Yworq9k/edit?usp=sharing
We will clean it up a bit and run it by the accountant one more time. You’ll see some points that we need to add to it at the bottom of the page.
I have received good information from a member about investments. I’ll share that with you tomorrow.
We will not only get through this, we’ll flourish.