Outbreak at factory highlights the unsung pandemic heroes

Disclaimer: I’ve never been inside a chicken factory, far less worked in one. But I’m squeamish enough and spoiled enough to know that, even in an ideal world, it’s not for me.

And this, as none of us needs reminding, is not an ideal world.

It’s not even been a remotely normal one this year and the coronavirus outbreak at the 2 Sisters plant in Coupar Angus has been a worrying setback in our journey out of lockdown – at least for those of us looking on. For the people who work there and their nearest and dearest, I’m guessing it’s been a frightening and disorientating one too.

It’s also shone a light on another of those uncomfortable facts of life that the pandemic has proved so effective at bringing out into the open: In this case, the darker side of working in the so-called gig economy.

In addition to the 900 permanent staff sent home with orders to do what the government says and stay inside while the plant is shut, there are 250 agency workers, many on zero hours contracts, who have found themselves trapped in a terrible limbo.

Because while the regular workforce can at least rely on the company continuing to pay their wages during their enforced isolation, their agency colleagues who – until Covid-19 rattled through the factory – were standing shoulder to shoulder on the production line don’t have that “luxury”.

The Courier was first to report on the discrepancy this week after workers, now relying on food handouts from the council but with their source of income suddenly pulled out from under them, spoke up.

“We have been working in the same conditions as the rest of the staff, putting ourselves at the same risks,” one told us. “But we are being left to fend for ourselves.”

Another, stuck in a shared flat with her daughter and two men, one of whom tested positive for the virus, said “I feel like I’m in a swamp. The more I try to change something the more I am pulled down.”

Imagine the dread of unpaid bills and mounting debts on top of the fear you might already have caught the virus from one of the 170-plus people connected to the factory whose cases have been confirmed.

There’s nothing shifty about what 2 Sisters Food Group has been doing. Large employers everywhere routinely use agency staff as a way to manage fluctuating workloads. It means they can take on people when they’re busy without having to cover their costs in the leaner times and as the firm points out, it’s not responsible for the folk caught up in this situation since their pay and conditions are handled by the recruitment providers who placed them. Staffline UK, the agency that deals with a lot of the Coupar Angus workers, assured us it’s acting within the law too. Maybe so, and maybe we should all rejoice that a company that was hit with a £15 million bill last month for not paying its staff the minimum wage is actually such a stickler for the rules.

But it’s not very fair, is it? And as local SNP MSP John Swinney pointed out this week, it potentially jeopardises the region’s battle to contain the outbreak. It’s a lot easier to do what you’re told and stay home if you know there’s money in the electricity meter.

And while Dominic Cummings might have been doing what any concerned father would do when he drove his wife and son hundreds of miles to his parents’ home in County Durham while displaying coronavirus symptoms at the height of the lockdown, I suspect there wouldn’t be the same