This article was published in the Plymouth Herald on Tuesday 15th August 2023, edited to omit reference to the era of Austerity and including a misprint that suggested 1 in 100 die of Covid, rather than the actual figure of 1 in 500.

Health & Safety has always been of central concern to trade unionists. Over generations we have organised and pressured employers and authorities to care for the wellbeing of everyone at work and in communities. We have been responsible for the development of hazard reduction in the workplace and fought for a work-life-balance – basic employment rights to sick pay, maternity and paternity pay, protection from oppressive behaviours and bullying. 

Before the first legislation placing responsibilities upon employers to ensure safety, accidents and perilous workplaces were common. The big fights led by trade unions to prove the risks from asbestos, coal dust, and infections such as Legionnaires Disease managed to bring down work-related deaths by 75% and days lost to work-related illness to around 25 million per year by 2012. 

Now, after a decade of deregulation, deletion of laws protecting workers rights, restrictions on legal challenges to employers, and the development of intense productivity-hikes, work-related illness has increased by a third, with 2 workplace deaths in every working week in the UK, largely in the construction, transport and manufacturing sectors.

In this Era of Austerity, the care of the worker and the responsibilities of the employer have been eroded.

Our new generation of young workers are being expected to put-up and shut-up – just do it, whatever the risk. And if you go off sick don’t expect to be paid, at least for the first three days and then only by the State, not the employer. 

Nowhere is this more pronounced and overt than in the current extreme prejudice meted out to those suffering infections. Flu? Take a Lemsip and come into work, who cares if you infect everyone around you – they’ll get through it.

COVID? If you don’t take a test you won’t be expected to stay off work. 

COVID is a livid case in point. With three new variants actively infecting our population and a current 25% increase in confirmed cases (underestimated because testing is not obligatory and the kits are no longer free), COVID is back.

In fact, it never went away. In the UK, 229,000 people have died from COVID so far, about one in very five-hundred who have suffered the infection. Some 2-million workers are experiencing long-COVID, the majority struggling to continue to work despite significant ill health. COVID attacks all the body’s organs, the most vulnerable organ sustaining lasting damage – limbs, heart, brain, liver. The dramatic rise in heart attacks in the under-35’s is due to COVID, that age-group unlikely to have received the vaccine.

Scientists are now monitoring another mutation, with a combination of mutations showing increased immune-evasion and producing more severe infections. This combination, referred to as “FLip,” is most prevalent in Spain and Brazil, with the former seeing a rapid spike in cases in recent weeks.

The official position is to “live with it”. Or die from it. The Pandemic is officially over.

Except it’s not. In recent weeks it has become clear that Britain, as well as the USA, Italy, Japan, Britain, Spain and other countries throughout the world are undergoing a significant new surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is taking place with virtually no public awareness, reporting in the corporate media or communication from government officials.

Waning immunity has been made worse by the  humid “mizzly” weather trapping infected aerosols and encouraging more into indoor spaces.

As schools reopen globally in the coming weeks after summer or winter break, hundreds of millions of children will be packed into overcrowded, poorly ventilated classrooms, deepening the current wave while society remains totally unprepared.

The best way to manage the spread of the virus is to have the vaccination, regularly and thoroughly wash hands and wear a mask. Whilst 80% of those eligible had the first vaccination, only 50% have had the third booster. There is no encouragement to do so. This Autumn there are further restrictions on who is eligible for the fourth, with no public challenge and indeed a rising tide of opposition to even the suggestion that COVID is a killer. 

And no-one is wearing a mask. Culturally, as if in response to a public campaign of denial, it has become almost alien to be seen wearing a mask in public or in the workplace. The mask, properly worn, is more a common courtesy to prevent others from receiving your infected aerosols that carry all sorts of viruses. 

It is little wonder that COVID is caught in hospitals given that staff no longer observe the pandemic rules, largely not even masked with the flimsy cheap face coverings.

How has this come about? Denial. Official denial. Political obfuscation of the facts and a cancel-culture perpetrated by those more interested in maintaining Big Business as usual than protecting the People.

In such a situation it is unlikely that anyone will adhere to a new period of Lockdown, the contrived opposition to the primacy of public health having been completely undermined by both government incompetence and survival-of-the-fittest ideology. And lies – a mantra routinely chanted by government ministers being that COVID caused current inflation. Nonsense, the drive to replenish and exceed lost profits driving inflation. 

At least we should welcome the new laboratory opened at the top-secret military germ-warfare establishment of Porton Down to investigate the new COVID strains as well as “DISEASE X” – the feared next pandemic caused by climate change heating the atmosphere into a petri-dish of new viruses. But will they make the preparations and speedy social response so absent from the COVID onset in 2019?

Trade unions are going to have to reassert our primary role as tribunes of the working class and fight, once more, for basic health & safety at work, starting with the requirement for strong protections against new COVID.