In the opening keynote address at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation’s REC 2020 conference on 8 September, the CBI director-general said there would be “winners and losers drawn very sharply”.

Fairbairn, who will leave the top role at the UK’s leading business consortium at the end of the year, warned: “We are heading into a period of high unemployment… We will not be able to head off a tsunami of high unemployment.”

She characterised today’s challenging business environment with: “I do think this is a Darwinian moment… This is going to be about survival.”

During her keynote address, Fairbairn called on the government to build a retraining agenda in “a people-led recovery” for those who will have lost work as a result of the pandemic and because of changes to business already under way pre-Covid, which have subsequently speeded up.

Partnership between government and business has never been more important, she said, adding that the two sectors now had the opportunity to create “the partnership of the century” in joining forces to revitalise the UK’s economic recovery.

She also argued for “ongoing support” for furloughed UK workers past the October deadline, saying that resulting costs should be shouldered by business and the individual workers themselves in addition to the government. Acknowledging that such discussions were taking place with the government, Fairbairn said: “We hope we will see a real step forward shortly.”

The CBI director-general was critical of how 20% of furloughed workers overall and 40% of furloughed IT workers had been asked to work during their time away from work, when the government was covering 80% of their salaries to not work. “These are things that will come home to roost,” she warned.

Fairbairn also expressed optimism for the future world of work, citing more flexible attitudes towards different models of working, the breaking down of work silos and greater trust between employer and employee. “We need to bottle” the increased productivity and better work communications “than we have seen in many years”, she said.