Alex Collinson, an analysis and research officer at Britain’s Trades Union Congress (TUC), points out that the reintroduction of the three-day waiting period means that if someone isolates five days a week, they will only be paid for two days. “It brings SSP down from £96 a week to £39, which isn’t enough to live on,” he says. “It’s a huge barrier to doing the right thing.”
The TUC is proposing an increase to around £346 a week as suggested by the Living Wage Foundation. “When people get sick, they shouldn’t face financial hardship when they take time off,” Collinson says.
The new rules are particularly annoying for those who are clinically frail and may have difficulty returning to the workplace. Alison Crockford works in cybersecurity as an awareness manager and is immunocompromised from a kidney transplant. “I’d love to go back to the office on a hybrid model, but now that testing and isolation is no longer the norm, it’s much harder for me to travel to the office and work safely,” she explains.
“The perception that those with underlying conditions ‘would die anyway’ and couldn’t be happy, functioning members of society depresses me,” says the 41-year-old. “Othering anyone who isn’t lucky enough to be completely healthy now is exhausting.”
Other than “getting better at not going to work while sick”, no part of the UK plan provides a credible explanation of how immunocompromised and disabled people are supposed to live and do their jobs alongside the virus.
“We’ve been working well in the UK for some time to promote equality of ability and status in the workplace, but lifting these measures takes a step back,” explains Simon Williams, a behavioral scientist at Swansea University. Indeed, data collected by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) in mid-March shows that people with disabilities were more likely to think life would never return to normal, with 57 percent avoiding close contact with people they don’t live with, compared with 41 percent of the non-disabled. The majority also spend more time at home.
During the pandemic, much attention has been paid to the number of Britons who have lost their lives to Covid, but less has been paid to those who have lost their health from long-term Covid. The true impact of this debilitating condition is beginning to be revealed. According to self-reported statistics from the ONS, 1.3 million Britons are experiencing symptoms lasting more than four weeks since being infected, including fatigue, shortness of breath and difficulty breathing. About 18 percent report that their ability to perform daily activities is “much” limited.
Needless to say, the impact on businesses is and will be huge. A quarter of UK employers cite long-term Covid as the leading cause of long-term absenteeism, in a survey of 804 organizations with more than 4.3 million employees by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. About 46 percent have employees with long-term Covid. The Resolution Foundation think tank suggests it is likely to be a contributing factor to the UK’s labor shortage and ‘major layoff’. The same is true in the US, according to the Brookings Institution.
