Joel Hellewell home

Focusing on sick pay is more important than mask wearing

17th July 2021

If you were Boris Johnson, at this point why would you not remove the final restrictions? His current broad aim is to avoid a scenario where we are unquestionably the worst again in terms of deaths or where there are images in the news of people lying on trolleys outside of overwhelmed hospitals. Right now the number of infections is rising exponentially and a percentage of these infections will result in either hospitalisation, death, or both. These percentages will be a lot smaller than they were during the waves prior to the mass vaccination of older and clinically vulnerable groups. There are two possible outcomes that might result from removing social distancing rules, which have been keeping new infections depressed by reducing the amount of opportunities for transmission between people. The first option is that this exit wave, due to vaccinations and immunity from prior infections, is not big enough to invoke the doomsday scenario that Boris wishes to avoid and he is praised for ending the pandemic in Britain. The second option is that Boris is forced to lockdown again to avoid overshooting healthcare capacity. It’s also possible that the removal of earlier restrictions regarding visiting other people and opening pubs already set us on the course for one of these two outcomes and that the further removal of restrictions on the 19th July will do little to change the outcome.

A mistake that I think I have been making so far is to think that lockdowns are always significantly politically and economically damaging to the people in whose interest our state is run, i.e. the capitalist class. I have argued before that a lot of the scrutiny of modelling results as “just models” could be understood in terms of their recommended outcome (lockdown) being very detrimental to capital circulation. Therefore, the capitalist class through the media outlets that it controls attacks the evidence that lockdowns are necessary so that people are able to continue working to make them profits. However, the unfortunate reality seems to be that while lockdown has been bad for some businesses, it has been very good for others. Lockdown has provided an ideal opportunity for the massive redistribution of wealth from workers to capitalists through the government bailout of private businesses that could no longer operate when their workers were forced to remain at home. The furlough scheme has been funded by huge levels of government borrowing that will be repaid through taxes paid by the British public. This public debt will undoubtedly provide justification for further austerity measures once the pandemic has ceased to be a pressing issue. This wealth redistribution is neatly demonstrated by the International Labour Organisation estimating that the pandemic cost workers 3.7 trillion dollars globally and Forbes reporting that the wealth of the richest 1% of households increased by 4 trillion dollars in 2020.

Many firms have been allowed to continue operating as normal if they make workplaces “covid secure”, which is an arbitrarily applied set of interventions that are either i) easy to implement but fairly ineffective in a work environment where you spend long periods of time next to each other (masks and random plastic dividers) or ii) would be effective but also would require large investments of money and time that companies and the government are not willing to make (decent ventilation). Some companies have implemented their own in-house contact tracing systems which they can also use to spy on their workers in various ways. They don’t seem to be obliged to share this contact tracing information so any outbreak within the workplace is hidden to maintain the facade that it has been safe for their employees. Businesses that have been able to adapt to their employees working from home are saving money because their employees now provide individualised pieces of the business infrastructure that they previously needed to provide to operate, such as an office or an internet connection. Many firms have reported that worker productivity has not noticeably declined over the pandemic, but for those that find that it has a new branch of specialised software to monitor worker productivity at a distance is emerging to combat this.

The increase in economic precarity in a country where 1 in 10 children already lived with “severe food insecurity” is an opportunity for companies to use the impact of lockdown on business as a smokescreen to restructure, downsize, or use dodgy fire and rehire tactics to claw back further concessions from desperate workers. Many businesses, likely smaller ones with less power to access government funding, will have struggled or gone under during the pandemic. But what is bad for individual capitalists is not necessarily bad for the capitalist class as a whole and the tendency of capital to centralise in the hands of fewer, richer individuals is an outcome of the process of capitalist accumulation as noted by Marx. Prior to COVID-19 in Britain it was already clear how much the survival of a lot of people relied on informal networks of support, jobs that paid poverty wages, and high levels of personal debt. These are not trends that will have reversed over the past year. The further immiseration of large swathes of the population might be a problem for Boris if it had begun to affect him politically at any point, but his poll ratings remain stubbornly high for a man that ruined many people’s Christmases and has forced thousands of weddings to be reorganised. He is helped to achieve this by having a leader of the opposition that is more interested in fighting internal battles within his own party rather than laying out any policies. Keir Starmer puts his head above the parapet every once in a while to demand things that are either already happening or to say that he understands how difficult everything is and preemptively cede all ground for criticising Boris later down the line.

Boris is able to never “learn the lesson” that getting rid of restrictions soon after deaths have returned to low levels will just cause an eventual rise in infections in the future. He can soak up the good press of “freedom day” and then not see a corresponding drop in support when he inevitably reintroduces restrictions or imposes a lockdown. There is a widespread public approval of strong control measures, a frankly terrifying poll in the Economist recently found that 1 in 3 people would be happy with social distancing and check-in for contact tracing purposes in public places forever, regardless of COVID-19. Just under 1 in 5 people approved of a permanent 10pm curfew forever, presumably these are older people that do not go out after 10pm themselves and are happy for there to be huge restrictions in the freedom of younger people for no obvious benefit. This public acceptance of control and monitoring takes place inside the worrying wider circumstances of the government wanting to offload its responsibility to refugees by holding them in prison facilities outside of the country, as well as passing one law that allows police to deem certain protests illegal and another that allows undercover cops to commit serious crimes with impunity.

The case for any restrictions needs to be made with the understanding that, given the specific way that they will be implemented by the British state, they will become a way of picking worker’s pockets and shifting the pain of diminished economic output onto them. The need for the restriction therefore must be great, otherwise you run the risk of allowing redistribution to continue for no great epidemiological gain. The coalition of scientists that have formed around Independent SAGE and Zero Covid, in the absence of any competent official opposition, have taken to fighting for restrictions to continue because their understanding remains that the government will recklessly remove restrictions at great risk to the public to appease the capitalist class. However, I’d argue that we need to update this picture and that during lockdown working structures have changed enough to allow a decent slice of the process of capital accumulation to continue as before. The capitalist class can also be appeased if the public will tolerate languishing in your homes under an endless lockdown as long as people are kept working. Those that are unable to do their job at home are eventually drafted back into a slightly modified workplace that has been rubber stamped as safe, even though studies that find that the markers of historic infection are much higher in key workers and retail workers show that they are not. This does not mean that the government won’t remove restrictions and ignore the public health outcome: the resulting large wave of infections that is underway right now might not result in hospitalisation or mortality, but it could result in a large wave of morbidity depending on how long covid infections play out in young children and vaccinated adults. These persistent infections will again be concentrated in those least able to bear the burden, persistent covid symptoms that leave you unable to work will be most prevalent in those with the least money to spare.

As others have noted, the conversation over the changes to restrictions on the 19th has devolved into a discussion over the personal morality of mask use, often these discussions also end up defending masks as a far more effective measure than they really are. We are currently seeing an exponential rise in cases even while mask use is mandated and masks have clearly historically failed to protect people in the service industry given their higher seroprevalence. Saying something like “I will keep wearing my mask after the 19th because I care about people with disabilities who are immunosuppressed” wrongly conveys that widespread mask adherence will be enough to protect disabled people from infection, even though masks fail to do this in many settings. The brutal reality is that callous cuts to disability living allowance and local council services have made it more likely that clinically vulnerable people will have to expose themself to infection while trying to live their day to day lives. For example, if you are clinically vulnerable and you have to take a busy bus for an hour to your hospital appointment because you cannot afford a taxi, then it seems unlikely to me that perfect mask adherence will be sufficient to prevent infection. I’m not arguing that masks are completely ineffective, simply that we should not, through the mandating of mask wearing, deem safe the poverty-induced exposure of those who desperately need to avoid infection.

The same goes for financial support for those that need to isolate themselves so that they do not infect others, both through adequate sick pay and additional specific financial support for the isolation period. Non-adherence with self-isolation during the pandemic is associated with being poorer, recent financial difficulty, and having a dependent in the household. Financial support would improve adherence with isolation, as well as encouraging people to engage with testing and contact tracing since the potential outcome of having to isolate would not be such a crippling burden on your livelihood. Sick pay and financial support to isolate (or shield for longer periods of time) are in my opinion the most important interventions for the coming weeks, where millions will need to isolate due to contact with a confirmed case or become infected themselves. It is understandable that these measures have received little attention from the government since they are some of the few intervention measures that would involve the bill being footed by the government or employers for the benefit of the working class. They run counter to the mass redistribution of wealth upwards that has taken place during the pandemic and also reiterate that public health is something that the state might put money towards for the good of its citizens rather than something that is expected of each citizen by the state. After all, the state maintains private property through violence so that the vast majority of people are continually compelled to work to pay for the things that they need to survive. The very least that the state can do is compensate people for the lack of earnings that results from being too sick to perform the work that they drive you towards.