Alex Collinson, an analyst and research official at the UK’s Trade Union Congress (TUC), points out that reintroducing the three-day waiting period means that if someone isolates for five days a week, they only get paid for two days. “It helps SSP go from £96 a week to £39, which is not enough to live on,” he said. “It’s a huge barrier to doing the right thing.”
The TUC is proposing an increase to around £346 per week, as suggested by the Living Wage Foundation. “When people are sick, they shouldn’t face financial hardship to take time off,” says Collinson.
The new rules are especially important for people who are clinically vulnerable and may struggle to return to the workplace. Alison Crockford works in cybersecurity as an awareness manager and suffers from kidney transplant immunosuppression. “I would love to go back to the office on a hybrid model, but now that testing and isolation is no longer the norm, it is a lot harder for me to go to the office and work in a safe way,” she explains. safe.
The 41-year-old said: “The sense that people with underlying diseases ‘will die’ and cannot be happy, active members of society makes me depressed. “It’s exhausting to ‘care’ for anyone who isn’t fortunate enough to be completely healthy right now.”
Other than “not going to work when sick”, no part of the UK plan offers a credible explanation of how immunocompromised and disabled people intend to live and do their jobs together. with viruses.
Simon Williams, a behavioral scientist at Swansea University, explains: “We’ve been working well in the UK for some time to promote competency-status equality in the workplace, but undoing removing these measures must take 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 are more likely to think life will never return to normal, and 57 percent are avoiding close contact with people they don’t live with, compared with 41 percent unimpeded. Most also spend more time at home.
During the pandemic, more attention has been paid to the number of Britons who have lost their lives to Covid, but less to those who have lost their lives to Covid. The real impact of this debilitating condition is beginning to come to light. According to self-reported statistics from the ONS, 1.3 million Britons are experiencing symptoms that have lasted more than four weeks since they were infected, including fatigue, shortness of breath, and shortness of breath. About 18% reported that their ability to perform daily activities was “very much” limited.
Needless to say, the impact on businesses has been — and will be — huge. A quarter of British employers Long cited Covid as the main cause of long-term health-related absences, in a survey of 804 organizations with more than 4.3 million employees by the Chartered Institute of Human Resources and Development. . About 46% have employees who have worked with Covid for a long time. Organization of Resolutions think tank suggests it is more likely to be a contributing factor to the UK labor shortage and the “Major Resignation”. The same is true in the US, according to Brookings Institution.
