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Morrisons’ cut in sick pay for unvaccinated workers is cruel. It needs to rethink | Jasmine Andersson

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Morrisons has announced that it will slash sick pay for unvaccinated workers, claiming it is removing the allowance in order to encourage unvaccinated workers to get the jab and boost vaccination rates.

Unvaccinated staff employed by the grocery giant will no longer be entitled to more than the legal minimum of £96.35 a week in statutory sick pay if they are instructed to self-isolate by test and trace but test negative for Covid. Morrisons joins a growing list of corporations – including Next, Ikea, Ocado and Wessex Water – in claiming that cutting sick pay will increase vaccine uptake.

Rather than buying into this misguided sense of unity, I’m left with a growing sense of unease about the implications of weaponising a public health goal to reduce sick payments for low-wage staff. Condemning staff to survive on less than £100 a week won’t teach anyone a lesson about the importance of the vaccine. Instead, it risks plunging workers into financial hardship, with some reluctant to declare they have been forced to self-isolate for fear of losing out on vital cash.

If we have learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that the lack of a robust safety net for workers has already exacerbated Covid transmission. Further cutting pay is no solution. It’s common knowledge that statutory sick pay is not enough for any worker to live on, and these companies know this. Even Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, said that he couldn’t live on £96.35 a week. As nothing has been done to make this amount liveable amid the worst health crisis in a generation, millions of the UK’s lowest-paid workers have been reliant on that amount if they have to self-isolate over the course of the pandemic, if they are entitled to it at all.

From a public health perspective, it’s nothing short of a disaster. The Trades Union Congress called the decision to strip statutory sick pay from workers an “own goal”, one that will drive up transmission rates because workers cannot survive on sick pay rates and may continue to work rather than take inadequate pay. Government polling during the January 2021 lockdown found that only 17% of people with symptoms were getting tested, while 15% continued going to work despite needing to self-isolate, with signs pointing to the low levels of sick pay driving staff back to work early.

It’s also an insulting way to thank supermarket staff who have borne the brunt of the virus while many of us had the luxury of working from home. Tasked with working through successive lockdowns amid soaring transmission rates, workers were encouraged to remain on the shop floor with limited protections from the virus.

Despite rhetoric lionising “key workers” throughout the pandemic, supermarket staff dealt with record levels of abuse from customers – who were encouraged, but not required, to wear masks in shops. While the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers campaigned to install further protections for workers from abuse, no additional legal protections were put in place, leading the British Medical Journal to conclude shop workers were five times more likely to contract coronavirus than the average person.

Now that companies wish to recoup their profits as they deal with spiralling absences caused by the Omicron variant, the health and wellbeing of workers has been curiously pushed up the agenda. While these companies claim they are on a public-health crusade to boost vaccine uptake among their workforce, the idea that they are doing it with workers’ benefit in mind is a hard sell.

A decision to cut sick pay ultimately saves companies money. It’s something Morrisons chief executive David Potts recognised when he first announced the statutory sick pay policy in a call with investors in September as part of a group of measures to limit “biblical costs” imposed by the pandemic. It’s also a fact recognised by retail giant Next, which agreed that while vaccine uptake is an “emotive topic”, it clarified that its decision was made to “balance staff and shareholder needs” as the resurgence of the Omicron variant has left shops paying out sick pay packages above and beyond any figures we have seen in our lifetime.

It’s clear that the anti-vaccination movement has thrived in a culture of distrust. Organisations reversing their obligations because they disagree with a worker’s decision – no matter how legitimate – will deepen this divide, and risk making martyrs out of workers who refuse to get the vaccine as the clampdown begins.

Getting vaccination rates up may be a worthy goal, but using price discipline on low-wage workers is a sinister and regressive way to go about it.

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