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| The rich are vaccinated against Covid-19 by their wealth |
The UK and Scottish governments are stumbling
back and forth from lockdown to premature reopening to 'mockdown', under pressure from the
business lobby - with current advice to stay at home, whilst giving loopholes
for non-essential retail giants, hospitality firms and construction companies
to drag workers into work, regardless of the mounting health threat from
gathering in large numbers.
Historically low wages, battered down for
decades in a systematic theft of wealth from the workers who produce it, have
led to historically low household savings and high household debt.
Combined with the derisory £95-a-week
Statutory Sick Pay, this is a recipe for disaster, endangering the lives of
many workers and vulnerable family members because they cannot afford to
self-isolate - as part of a plan to not just reduce, but eliminate COVID-19,
with mass testing, tracing and isolation alongside vaccination.
Yet the wealth is there if we distributed it
to ensure full average wages for all sick or self-isolating workers, or those placed
on furlough through temporary shutdowns.
NHS Crisis
A well-funded, fully-equipped NHS, with the
necessary staffing levels and decent pay, is at the heart of what's required in
the pandemic emergency.
Some Scottish hospitals are even more in
danger of being swamped than they were last Spring, cancelling appointments and
procedures for some non-Covid conditions.
Decades of governments deliberately refusing
to invest in the NHS, despite dire warnings from scientists and health experts,
has led to this life-threatening situation.
In Scotland, 6,000 hospital beds – 25% of the total - disappeared in the past 13 years of SNP governments failing to resist and defeat Westminster governments’ butchery.
Nurses Skip Meals
The average health worker has suffered a 20%
pay cut in the past 10 years, with catastrophic impact on morale at a time when
hospital workers are already drastically overstretched.
A new survey by Nurses United and Nursing
Notes confirmed a shocking state of affairs in Scotland's hospitals.
A startling 97% of nurses surveyed feel
undervalued by the government; 90% of them have suffered mental health problems
during the pandemic.
One in every three nurses has skipped meals
to feed their family or pay bills; 58% of them have used credit cards for daily
essential spending.
Alongside gruelling 12-hour shifts - caused
primarily by understaffing - this has led to one in every four nurses telling
the survey they plan to leave their job in the next year. The two most common
primary reasons they give for this catastrophic potential exodus of skills,
experience and dedication are low pay (18%) and poor work/life balance (15%).
The Virus of Poverty
Poverty kills people.
Poverty pay is a killer, more especially
amidst the pandemic.
COVID-19 is not the great leveller. A tiny
minority of the population have been vaccinated by wealth. Their wealth affords
them spacious, well-heated homes, drastically greater access to working from
home than the lower-paid millions, and far better conditions for remote
home-learning by their children.
The struggle to eliminate the Coronavirus has
to include an urgent struggle against poverty pay, basement level benefits, and
a sick pay scheme that at best is a sick joke.
Health staff and millions of other people
officially designated as ‘key workers’ have gone from the Tories offering them
two-faced clapping, to slapping them in the face.
A public sector pay freeze - with a good dose
of divide and rule between different types of Public Sector worker thrown in -
is certainly not the cure to conditions which create countless avoidable
deaths.
NHS staff fully deserve the 15% pay rise many
of them are demanding, to part-compensate for the 20% pay cut in the last
decade.
Organise for £12 Minimum Now!
The STUC should muster serious plans to
mobilise workers in pursuit of the demand they raised last March: for an
immediate £2-an-hour pay increase for every key worker, regardless of which job
or sector they work in.
That would be a unifying demand to rally
thousands of workers behind. As would the struggle to underpin it with a £12-an-hour, legally-enforced minimum wage for all workers from the age of 16,
with equal pay for women.
Plenty of big businesses could easily afford
such a modest pay scale, considering the skyrocketing profits during the
pandemic - and eye-watering incomes for directors.
Anyone would welcome the Christmas bonus of
one week's wages awarded to B&M Bargains workers at Christmas. But how
pathetic a sop that is to low pay, considering B&M’s chief executive
grabbed a bonus of £300million!
Those of us who have persistently fought for
6 years to force the USDAW retail union national leadership into serious action
to win a £10 minimum wage will welcome that being achieved this week for
Morrison's supermarket staff.
But Morrison’s can well afford this,
particularly as 25% of the pay rise will be funded by removal of annual
bonuses, and more so given the enormous surge in profits that the workforce has
put their lives at risk to generate. And Morrison's chief executive, David
Potts, should be renamed David Potts of Gold! His income last year was
£4.2million.
People and Pay Before Profit
Decent guaranteed pay - and a guaranteed
minimum 16-hour week for every worker who wants it - are important strands to
solutions to the pandemic. As is full, 100% average wages for sick or self-isolating workers.
Collective action by the potentially powerful
trade union movement on these fighting demands could help prevent further,
unnecessary deaths, created by that lethal combination: poverty and COVID-19.
A serious fight needs to be organised to put
people and pay before profit; workers’ health before bosses’ wealth.
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