COVID-19: Workers Dying for Sick Pay and Safety

 

Thousands dying from lack of safety action or income support 

Several new Reports confirm what we have contended for the past year: governments and employers are killing workers as they put big business profits ahead of workers’ health amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

The TUC reports over 10,000 workers have died of the virus, arising from workplace infections, and countless more are suffering the long-term health problems of long-Covid.

Yet, the very same week, Public Health England identified 3,549 outbreaks of COVID-19 in workplaces since last July, with another 100 last week alone, despite the whole of the UK being in lockdown. Over 500 workers tested positive in the big Swansea DVLA centre recently, and unions in Scotland have just written to the Scottish government demanding urgent action to curb the spread of COVID-19 clusters in call centres.

Those figures will be a gross underestimate, as they only cover outbreaks in offices, factories, construction sites, etc. actually reported to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

Not One Single Employer Sanctioned!

What are the HSE - and the government which funds and directs their operations - doing in response?

Not one single employer has been prosecuted for presiding over the supreme hazardous workplace conditions; failure to tackle the spread of COVID-19, with its lethal consequences.

Not one single workplace has even been issued a HSE Prohibition Notice, whereby inspectors have the power to stop workplace operations, where they judge continued industrial or commercial activity is “deemed to be injurious or damaging to health.”

Not one employer has even been fined for negligence, whereas individuals who breach lockdown regulations face penalties of up to £1,000.

One of the prime causes of employers escaping any significant sanctions from the HSE is that the latter decided to classify COVID-19 as only a “significant” threat, rather than place it in its highest risk category, of being “serious”.

In making this breath-taking decision, the HSE has been fully backed by governments.

Tory Minister Thinks COVID Deaths 'Non-Permanent'?!

In an astonishing declaration - even by the standards of the Tory government - Employment Minister Mims Davies tried to justify this inaction by the HSE when she told Parliament:     “the effects of Covid are non-permanent or reversible, non-progressive, and any disability is temporary for the working population as a whole.”

Those of us who have suffered the loss of friends or family members can angrily testify to this heartless Tory hack that death from COVID-19 is both permanent and irreversible.

HSE Pressured to Keep Workplaces Open

One experienced HSE inspector, who withheld his name for fear of retribution, told the press: “HSE internal instructions have said they would be very reluctant to support an inspector who did serve a prohibition notice.”

He went on to confirm government pressure is being brought to bear on them to keep workplaces open, failing to take account of risks to workers and their families.

“HSE are telling us ‘walk off site if you feel unsafe’, but you can’t do anything to stop work. We can leave crowded workplaces lacking social distancing if we feel ourselves threatened, but we can’t stop people from working.”

That simply confirms what we wrote last April about a complete lack of safety inspections on many construction sites, exacerbated by the advice to HSE inspectors to stay clear of risks to themselves, while meantime building workers put themselves on the line - including for non-essential work, such as building luxury apartments.

The underlying reason for this hooligan inaction by HSE bosses, in tandem with the government - taking no meaningful actions against workplaces being super-spreaders of the Coronavirus - is cuts.

The Tories tried to make much of investing £14million in HSE last June, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared with previous cuts of £100million.

No wonder HSE can’t cope with the deluge of over 100,000 Covid-related complaints from workers and the public in the past year – 25,000 of them last month alone.

It Takes Collective Workers' Action

It took strike action, and the threat of walking off the job, to force governments – in the UK, Scotland and internationally – to extend the closures of many non-essential building sites and non-food retail, or for employers to provide even the bare necessities of hand cleansers, social distancing and other safety measures in workplaces across all sectors that remained open.

And amongst the unsung frontline heroes of this year of the plague are the thousands of shop stewards and union Health and Safety representatives who have confronted employers with demands for concrete safety measures, risk assessments and cessation of unsafe work. Often facing obstruction, hostility, even victimisation, as they seek to defend workers’ lives.

For Workers' Control

This volunteer army of workers’ representatives should be at the heart of improving workplace safety - with the full collaboration of an expanded HSE inspectorate. Not just during the pandemic, but for the ongoing future.

Workers’ control of health and safety - based on the day-to-day knowledge of these people rooted in the shop floor - is not only democratic, but a far safer mechanism than reliance on remote, well-paid senior managers, wielding pressure on behalf of the owners to maximize profit, even where that means cutting corners and risking lives.

Lost Wages Prevent Self-Isolation

Meantime, medical professionals have published new Reports underlining the fatal risks workers are being subjected to, especially amongst the lowest paid, due to the utter failure of governments to provide proper support to those who should be self-isolating.

Dr Muge Cevik is an expert in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St Andrews.

She and a group of other experts have just published a damning report in the British Medical Journal which demonstrates that less than 20% of people are able to adhere to isolation regulations - even though the overwhelming majority are willing and wanting to do so.

The report carries data showing the vast majority of people are willing to self-isolate when tested positive, but the actual ability to do so is 3 times lower amongst those on less than £20,000 a year, or with less than £100 in savings.

The article’s other underlying conclusion is hardly a new revelation to those of us who have fought throughout the past year for full, 100% average wages for every sick or self-isolating worker, to prevent them being dragged into work by the threat of financial ruin. Lost wages are the primary reason for not following full isolation guidelines.

Low Pay and Crowded Housing

In other statements, Dr Cevik has highlighted the majority of hospitalizations are from infections amongst key workers. 

She told CNN: “There are huge outbreaks in warehouses, meatpacking plants, care homes... and the only thing that combines these sectors are low-paid workers likely to live in crowded houses.”

Back in April 2020, I wrote that the government should provide not just full average wages but the option of safe, staffed and caring self-isolation facilities (quarantine) as part of the NHS, for example by usage of unoccupied hotel rooms.

In the recent BMJ article the medical professionals argue that governments “need to focus support on those in high exposure occupations, living in overcrowded housing... and should include free and safe accommodation, alongside adequate income support, job protection and help with caring responsibilities.”

They cite examples of Test-and-Care schemes in San Francisco and New York where people testing positive are offered either free hotel accommodation or free delivery of food, medicine and transport (and even dog walking services) to help them quarantine at home.

Predictably, those measures have not only boosted adherence to self-isolation but greatly increased the uptake of testing itself, as workers on a pitiful income are more likely to avoid getting tests, even though they have symptoms, because they are terrified at the prospect of being forced to take time off work on barely any income.

Terrified to Take Time Off Sick

Examples of the latter are rampant. That was one of the factors in the cruel carnage in Scotland's privatised care homes last year, where workers on or just above the miserly minimum wage, with no worthwhile occupational sick benefit schemes, dragged themselves into work to avoid going under financially.

A union organiser for taxi drivers explained: “I know a driver who had to self-isolate four times in 2 months. How does that work? These are people currently only earning £35 to £50-a-day and are in most cases being charged to install protective screens in the cab. When you’re in a desperate situation you take risks.”

Or as a cleaner described, she has been forced to come in to work in an empty office, where the staff are all working from home, to clean it 4 days a week. Last month she caught COVID-19, probably on a bus.

She stayed at home a few days but then went back to work:

“I couldn’t afford to stay at home because I was getting hardly any income. I feel guilty that I went to work and might have infected more people but I had no other option.”

When is £500 Worth Nothing? - When It's Refused!

The Tory Minister in charge of Test and Trace, Dido Harding, told Parliament that 20,000 people a day are failing to stay at home after being instructed to. Of course, countless others have avoided taking tests, out of fear of losing their income.

In a grotesque and cynical PR stunt, the government conceded payment of £500 to those forced to self-isolate... but with enough strings attached to strangle it as any kind of support for low-paid workers that could help them stay off work and help break the chains of infection. In real life, nearly half of all those who’ve applied have been refused this modest sum, including 86% of all applicants in Liverpool.

Stop a Premature Stampede Back

The governments of Westminster and Holyrood are in danger of using the rays of hope felt by us all at the rollout of Vaccines to stampede people back to non-essential work, risking yet another eruption of disease and death, as was caused by the profit-driven lunacies of ‘Eat Out and Help Out’ last summer, and the commercialised craze over the Christmas period.

Shop-floor workers’ representatives, including Health and Safety reps, should be given the full backing of their national union leaderships to resist premature reopening, and to insist on enforcement of proper health and safety measures in those workplaces unavoidably functioning.

Full Average Wages - Workers' Health Before Bosses' Wealth

In tandem with that, socialists and trade unionists need to step up to demand that employers and governments pay full,100% average wages to every worker, whether on furlough, sick leave or in self-isolation.

Elimination of COVID-19 will require more than just vaccinations. It also needs localised Test, Trace Isolate and Care systems, free of charge.

And looking beyond immediate palliative measures, working-class people need a leadership prepared to tackle overcrowded housing, low pay, the sick joke of £95 Statutory Sick Pay – and the deeper root causes of increasingly frequent pandemics, themselves the products of a globalised capitalist system which trashes the planet and its people for profit.

 

 

RICH VACCINATED BY WEALTH: POVERTY KILLS

 

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.

This article is also published in the fortnightly Scottish Socialist Voice.

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DEMAND FULL AVERAGE WAGES FOR ALL SICK WORKERS!

Throughout the pandemic I have argued, both as a socialist and elected trade union convenor, for full average wages for anyone sick or in self-isolation from COVID-19.

My concern, particularly amidst the worst killer pandemic in a century, was that some workers dumped onto £95-a-week Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) would confront the impossible choice of financial ruin or dragging themselves into work, spreading the virus, sickness, even death.

Even where unions have conquered some form of occupational sickness benefit, it is frequently less than normal wages, accumulates sick absence penalty points, and excludes workers from a single penny company sick benefit if their absence points are too high.

And right across the board, employers are busily hacking away at occupational sick benefits, under cover of the Coronavirus crisis. That includes companies whose profits rocket beyond £millions to £billions. 

With household debts at record highs, savings at record lows, and job insecurity looming like a train charging down the track towards millions of workers, they are stressed to breaking point, but have nothing to fall back on; work makes many sick, but they can’t afford to take time off to recover. 

A new volcano of both physical and mental ill-health is set to explode, after months of home-working, cramped housing, and social isolation.

Sickness Unaffordable 

Mine might be the first case of a shop steward in Scotland losing his/her job in a dispute with an employer over workers’ health and safety during the Coronavirus, but it throws a harsh spotlight on the broader, deeper crime in society: sick workers can’t afford to be sick – and that makes them even sicker!

Sick pay in the UK is not only a national, but an international scandal.

Statutory Sick Pay of £95.85 a week is appallingly miserly even by the inadequate standards of Britain’s capitalist competitors.

The European average equivalent is £245 a week.

A worker taken sick in this country is only guaranteed 20% of average wages, whereas across Europe it’s 65%. 

Belgium guarantees sick workers their full salary for 30 days. Germany pays their full salary for 6 weeks and 70% of a worker’s wage for the remainder of sick leave. Norway pays up to 52 weeks full salary if a worker has a long-term illness.

Britain is the worst in the whole of Europe, with the single exception of Malta.

Sick Pay Exclusion Zones 

And it gets worse. The word ‘statutory’ implies everybody is guaranteed that amount. Far from it!

Anyone on less than the Lower Earnings Threshold of £120 a week is disqualified from SSP.  That constitutes a mass army of 1.8 to 2 million workers excluded from even that derisory £95. 

That includes a third of all those on zero-hour contracts; one in 10 women workers; 20% of 16-24-year olds; and over a quarter of those working beyond the age of 65 - in part because of the pathetic state pension.

The UK is one of only four countries which totally excludes the self-employed; a growing proportion of workers. 

And most migrant workers are excluded from even this paltry benefit, relying on literally zero income if they fall sick; many hired by the most unscrupulous profiteers, who habitually ignore health and safety regulations, let alone offer any kind of company sick benefit. 

Britain truly is the sick man of Europe, making working class men and women sick, but depriving them of adequate sick pay.

Greencore Northampton - lack of union makes you sick! 

Fatal Consequences 

The consequences are horrendous at the best of times, but fatal during the pandemic.

A new rash of COVID-19 clusters has erupted in poultry and meat plants, sweatshop garment factories, and at several food production workplaces.

Greencore, who produce Marks and Spencer’s sandwiches, have been at the heart of a scandal at their Northampton branch where 324 of its 834-workforce tested positive for COVID-19.

As Sarah Woolley, the new general secretary of the Bakers union (BFAWU) explained at a recent online rally I was invited to speak at - alongside other workers, Sarah and John McDonnell MP - it’s significant Greencore’s Northampton branch does not recognise the Union. They refused to close as cases multiplied, ignoring workers' concerns. 

When the government eventually forced temporary closure, self-isolating workers were expected to exist on £95. As Sarah explained, many were forced to use food banks, and with many multiple family members working there, entire household incomes vanished overnight. “Hearing people who work for a company that makes £55million in pure profit talking about how their income dropped from £240 to £95 is just horrific. How the hell are they supposed to pay the bills?”

Throughout the lockdown we warned Scotland's care homes were incubators for COVID-19. In part, due to decades of refusal to invest in NHS staff and equipment leading to 1,200 elderly patients being transferred out of hospital wards into care homes to clear bed space, without being tested, or worse still, despite testing positive.

This criminal carnage was added to by care home workers, almost universally denied any occupational sick benefit, being terrified of self-isolating, with their already-low incomes slashed to £95 SSP. 

Bakers' Union at TUC 

The Bakers’ Union initiated a Motion at the TUC congress calling for full wages for sick workers for 6 weeks, paid directly by the employer, and increased Statutory Sick Pay thereafter. 

Alongside the struggle for a vastly enhanced minimum wage for all over 16 - at least £12 an hour - the battle for full 100% average wages for all sick workers - whether with COVID-19 or anything else - is critical. Central to a future that puts workers’ health and lives miles ahead of the wealth and privileges of profiteering capitalist employers and their hired enforcers in the boardrooms and senior management. 

Workers' Control of H&S 

The lived experiences of millions during the pandemic has also reinforced the urgency of the Scottish Socialist Party's demand for workers’ control of health and safety, through elected committees of union health and safety reps and shop stewards.

Many of the hazards at work, physical and mental, could be removed and prevented by workers’ representatives whose everyday experiences put them far more in tune with workplace risks than the depleted, downgraded Health and Safety Executive Inspectors, whose numbers have been halved. And who are now to be replaced by undertrained substitutes, with less powers, from privatised outsourcing companies. 

No wonder only 38% of workers reported in this week's BritainThinks Survey that their employers carried out a COVID-secure risk assessment, and only a similar 42% have been given adequate PPE.

A system run for private profit will always cast workers' health to the back of the queue, and when capitalist profiteering triggers illness through stress, insecurity, poverty and shoddy safety standards, sick workers are tossed aside like squeezed lemons. 

The potential power of the organised trade union movement needs to be urgently mobilised to put workers’ health before capitalists' wealth. 

Full, 100% average wages for all sick workers, and control of workplace safety by elected union representatives, are two of the measures which must be pursued by our side with the same determination as bosses chase after shortcuts to profit. 

Workers’ lives before profit must be turned from a phrase into a fight. 

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This blog has also been published in the online Scottish Socialist Voice. 

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