Unsafe work the problem

THANK you for the article ‘Are gatherings the reason why cities have highest virus rates?’ (Post, April 14) and for pointing out where we seem to be headed with Covid: the spikes of infection and worst-hit areas are in working-class areas, which I think answers the article’s headline question about why cities are hardest hit – and not leafy suburbs.

Public Health Wales states it is “too soon to speculate if it is gatherings that are causing spikes of infection” – although much of the media and most politicians only show pictures of, or talk about, groups of people on beaches – but where are the photos of thousands of people crowded together in unsafe workplaces?

Or of the millions having to work/study in crowded schools? In Swansea we know of hundreds of cases at the DVLA in the past year.

In the TV documentary looking at why Rhondda Cynon Taf is so hard hit, one woman nailed it: “People can’t afford not to go to to work.”

After a year it is not “too soon to speculate” what is killing and has killed so many – it is the policy by UK Government and followed by many of putting business before lives and the poverty this causes, which forces people to work in unsafe conditions while bosses stay home.

Your article rightly points out that the ‘spikes’ are all in areas of crowded housing and lower incomes and pockets of poverty. It is teachers, students and LSAS who have most close contact in schools – not governors or management. Delivery workers are at risk – not the owners of the companies, etc.

We have discovered during this pandemic it is the lower paid who are holding this society together, working in the worst conditions and least valued and they are also paying the price in numbers of lives lost/wrecked by this terrible illness.

Covid is increasingly becoming an illness of the poor.

We should all support the DVLA workers in their fight for safer working conditions: in the 21st Century nobody should have to put their lives on the line when they go to work. If DVLA workers win, then other workplaces are more likely to be made safer – if they don’t we’ll still be getting told it’s people meeting outside work which is the problem!

H BOOKER

People Before Profit, Swansea