Richard Branson’s putting Virgin Airlines staff on unpaid leave and people have been doing the maths

John Plunkett. Updated March 16th, 2020

Virgin Atlantic is planning to ground 75% of its fleet by the end of this month as a result of coronavirus and will ask staff to take 8 weeks unpaid leave, according to reports today.

BREAKING: Virgin Atlantic plans to cut about 80% of flights each day by the 26th of March, grounding 75% of planes by then. They are also asking staff to take 8 weeks of unpaid leave during the next three months.

More on #COVID19 here: https://t.co/syXnIEDWKD pic.twitter.com/cdACryuu5i

— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 16, 2020

It got people thinking how fair this was, especially given how extraordinarily rich Branson is reported to be. These 4 responses pretty much sum it up.

Virgin Atlantic have 8,500 employees and Branson has asked them to take 8 weeks unpaid leave.

It would cost £4.2 million to pay all of these employees £500 a week to cover this leave. In total that’s a cost of £34 million for 8 weeks.

Richard Branson is worth £4 billion.

— Liam Young (@liamyoung) March 16, 2020

richard branson has enough money to pay all 8,571 of his employees £47,000 and still keep over 90% of his unearned fortune https://t.co/PA67XojrnN

— flo (@flocorf) March 16, 2020

https://twitter.com/TobyJPeacock/status/1239548859946340355?s=20

If Richard Branson paid his 8,500 staff £10,000 for those eight weeks from his own personal wealth he'd still have £4.15 billion to scrape by on https://t.co/Z8487P6qva

— James Felton (@JimMFelton) March 16, 2020

In short, this.

Bransons employees go without whilst a billionaire with a private island and space program wants a bailout from the treasury

— Lesser Known English Big Foot (@KnownFoot) March 16, 2020

Image Pixabay