British bakery chain Greggs will not be paying any of its 25,000 employees if they have to self-isolate when returning from holiday.
Greggs introduced a Covid-19 (Coronavirus) specific policy in April 2020, detailing that if an employee is forced by law to self-isolate for 14 days after travelling overseas, they will not be paid for the time that they have to take off.
The government announced on 25 July 2020 that anyone returning from Spain, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands will have to self-isolate for 14 days.
Greggs has currently placed 6,000 employees on furlough, with no redundancies made as of yet.
Roger Whiteside, chief executive at Greggs, said: “We’ve tried to be very fair about how to handle this Covid-19 pandemic. We topped up the furlough pay from 80% to 100% during the lockdown phase, because we thought that was the fair thing to do.
“And then when news came out that people could start to think about going away on holiday, we thought about that, but we made it clear to people: look there is a risk clearly that quarantine might apply, so if you do decide, you have to take that risk for yourself.
“You can’t expect the business to pay for your quarantine if you’ve chosen to take the risk that you’d go abroad and then find that you’ve then got to quarantine when you get back. So we won’t be paying for that quarantine.”