From national heroes to zero
COVID TESTING WORKERS LET GO
THE abrupt end to free mass Covid19 testing has left thousands of workers without jobs after months spent working all hours to keep the country safe.
The testing sites closed for good last week, and with staff having been made redundant at short notice and without being entitled to any compensation, many have been left “with nothing” – just days after performing a vital service on the frontline of the battle to contain the coronavirus.
Staff, who were employed by Sodexo who held the contract to manage testing centres around the country, have gone from testing hundreds of people a day for Covid19 to unemployment. And many are upset at the way the firm has managed this process.
One Byker-based staffer – David Kirkbride who was a manager at the mass testing site in Wallsend – said he and colleagues who had worked long hours and throughout Christmas had been “thrown to the dogs”.
“There’s a canny few staff who’ve not got work since it shut,” he said. “And it’s not just the young lads. “For the majority of staff it was their full-time job. People were relying on it for their money – and now a lot of them have just got nothing.”
Sodexo has said it is working to redeploy as many former test centre workers as possible. So far the firm said 1,000 had been found alternative jobs and it is working with 1,000 more who had asked for new jobs.
David is among those considering taking Sodexo to an employment tribunal as he wants to ensure staff receive all they are entitled to.
Some workers feel group consultation processes ought to have taken place with employees at testing sites. However, Sodexo maintains every employee has been
“treated fairly and recompensed in accordance with their employment rights”.
The firm says it began consultation with staff “as appropriate” at all of its sites. But some staff dispute this. The firm claimed there were fewer than 20 employees on the Wallsend site with fixed-term or permanent contacts so it was not obliged to carry out group consultations. The employees believe recent legal cases have shown there are some circumstances where casual staff ought to be considered to have worked under a so-called “umbrella contract” – but this is a largely untested area of law.
Guidance published by the Local Government Association says: “Where a casual worker wishes to establish they are an employee with sufficient continuity of service to, for example, claim unfair dismissal, they may argue that they have been employed under an overriding ‘umbrella’ or ‘global’ contract that spanned the periods during which they were not working.
“Courts and tribunals have been fairly unwilling to date to find that such a contract of employment exists between periods of casual employment. However, it may be possible for an individual to argue that an umbrella contract of employment exists if either there is evidence to suggest that the parties have expressly agreed that the individual’s work will be on a regular, defined pattern.”
David – who had a fixed-term contract – said he had serious concerns about the way consultation had been managed.
He added: “We’ve been running around testing 400, 500 people a day, working long hours over Christmas. Site leads up and down the country are furious with it. I think it’s in the public interest that people know this company making millions are treating us like this.”
Another site manager said: “Nobody came into these jobs thinking they would be a long-term career, but we have not been treated fairly through the redundancy process.”
The Labour Party taken an interest in the situation of workers like David, and Newcastle Central MP Chi Onwurah said: “It is not acceptable for any employee to be let go without the proper consultation process, but it adds insult to injury when it’s those who have been on the front line against Covid.”
Neal Gisborne, Sodexo’s divisional managing director for test centres, said: “When the government announced on 21 February that free testing would end in England by 1 April, we wrote to everyone within hours to inform them of this including all casual workers.
“As soon as we were officially notified test centres in England would close on 31 March, we followed up in writing to say consultation would commence where appropriate.
“Irrespective of these exceptional circumstances, we have made sure we have kept everyone fully informed and are committed to ensuring every single one of our employees and casual workers is treated fairly and recompensed in accordance with their employment rights.”