We must help those hit by quarantines and lockdowns
Hard financial realities may force those returning from Spain to flout the rules by reporting for work, says James Moore
It isn’t just the travel industry that’s been caused a severe problem by the sudden reimposition of quarantine requirements on people travelling to this country from Spain.
Many employers, workers, and especially freelancers, have been left in a nasty bind. It always seems to be this country’s army of often low-waged freelancers who get hit hardest.
But let’s consider the plight of the small employer first. What if, having just about managed through lockdown, a small business that can’t feasibly have its staff working from home is just starting to get moving
again when a key member of the team returns from a pre-booked holiday or business trip to Spain.
A responsible employer would, of course, tell them to stay home because while losing an important member of staff through quarantine is bad, losing an entire team to an active outbreak of the virus is much, much worse.
But it isn’t hard to envisage cases where responsibility is at war with hard financial reality.
What if the employee says, look, I was really careful. Me and the family kept to ourselves, and stayed 2m from everyone else. We didn’t see anyone coughing.
There are some who might be tempted to say, OK, come in, if we don’t get our orders fulfilled we mightn’t have a business for much longer. Just make sure you wear a mask at all times, hey.
Let’s flip it around. What if, faced with a couple of weeks on statutory sick pay (a miserable £95), the employee doesn’t have this conversation. They simply turn up because they can’t easily afford not to having, perhaps, recently paid for a holiday they could only just about afford.
Maybe they get sent home if the boss knows they went to Spain. But what if said boss instead turns a blind eye or at least doesn’t ask too many questions of an excuse such as, no, no, we went to Greece in the end.
Oh. OK. Just make sure you wear a mask at all times, hey, they say, crossing their fingers because it won’t happen to them.
These possible dilemmas pale by comparison to the the ones facing freelancers who don’t get paid if they don’t work. As this column highlighted last week, they’ve already been left out in the cold through the course of the pandemic by Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, who airily dismissed a plea for help made on their behalf by the Treasury Committee.
Given the difficulties they’ve faced over the past few months, they too may ignore the government’s guidelines because they feel they have no choice.
There’s been a fairly heated debate about whether the renewed quarantine requirements are necessary, and whether they have been imposed with too wide a scope by including areas such as, say, the Balaeric and Canary Islands, which haven’t suffered the same spike in cases as seen on the Spanish mainland.
But here’s the thing. The nature of this vicious little virus is that even if this is a case of the government being overcautious, it’s probably not the last time that a travel corridor will have to be closed. There will also likely be further local lockdowns mandated like the one in Leicester.
Some will probably be very necessary even if this one is debatable. Their success in containing the virus will inevitably be inhibited by dint of the financial dilemmas they leave people impaled on the horns of.
If it’s a case of risk your home/job vs the possibility that you might spread coronavirus, but only if you have it, a lot of people will cross their fingers and hope they don’t have it.
To effectively keep Covid-19 at bay, the dilemma needs to be taken off the table.
To do that, statutory sick pay must be made available to all those who can’t work as a result of it, and it needs to be raised from its current, miserable, level of £95 to something closer to the living wage. And by that I mean the real living wage set by the Living Wage Foundation, not what the government likes to refer to as the National Living Wage.