This is an interesting story. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-56213042 My first thought on reading this was "that's awful." Forcing your staff to loan you money at the risk of their job is entirely unreasonable and unfair. But then I thought about how my employer cut everyone's salary by 10% shortly after Covid started and our revenues died. No on here complained; we understood that it was a extraordinary measure during an extraordinary time, and got on with it. Revenues have since rebounded and our salaries restored, with no restitution for lost pay. Realistically, the Tomahawk staff have it better than we did; they should, at least, get the money back (barring the company going insolvent). It's better than layoffs and it's better than a blanket salary cut, too. I suppose the ethics of this boil down to how much the staff are earning; if they're all on minimum wage and get forced to loan 10% of it to the company, it's clearly worse than if they're all earning 80k a year, for example. And unlike the start of the pandemic, there are now government assistance options in place; there's a question to be asked over whether or not Tomahawk took advantage of them. Somehow I suspect the staff are closer to minimum wage than 80k, of course...
